Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children

Article Article scientifique Article Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children eng 2004 author Franck Julie 530589 author Ohayon Stéphany 92510 author Chillier-Zesiger Laurence 27065 author Frauenfelder Ulrich Hans 22332 author Hamann Cornelia 29083 author Rizzi Luigi 22716 author Zesiger Pascal Eric 0000-0002-7450-4899 24163 147-180 10.1016/S0911-6044(03)00057-5 0911-6044 http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0911604403000575 We report a study on the spoken production of subject–verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting ‘local noun'. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on; (2) singular is produced as the default number until age 7 included; (3) more errors are produced with adjunct structures than with postmodifiers, but only from age 8;5 on. In contrast, even the older SLI children showed no attraction effect, a predominance of the singular as default, no effect of syntactic structure and, more generally, persistent high error rates. The turning point observed between 7 and 8;5 in normal children, characterized by a reduced error rate and a significant effect of syntactic structure, is interpreted as an index of the automatization of agreement. The syntactic structure effect is discussed in terms of the interplay of structural and working memory factors in the computation of long-distance relationships. Language development Spoken production Subject–verb agreement Attraction Syntactic structure Automatic processing Specific Language Impairment Dewey 150 108 Section de psychologie 71 false 595 Psycholinguistique Journal of neurolinguistics 17 2-3 2b2b5e9c-3505-4e9b-8af2-877bdee8beb2 Article (Published version) Public Franck_2004.pdf 228392 application/pdf openAccess Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l'éducation / Section de psychologie

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Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children	Journal of neurolinguistics			2004	781	415

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Ohayon, Stéphany