The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension

Article Article scientifique Article The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension eng 2010 author Zesiger Pascal Eric 0000-0002-7450-4899 24163 author Chillier-Zesiger Laurence 27065 author Arabatzi Marina 133953 author Baranzini Lara 97313 author Cronel-Ohayon Stéphany author Franck Julie 530589 author Frauenfelder Ulrich Hans 22332 author Hamann Cornelia 29083 author Rizzi Luigi 22716 571-603 10.1017/S0142716410000147 0142-7164 This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the reflexive clitic chain is nested within it. We argue that this structural difference introduces differences in processing complexity, chain crossing being more complex than nesting. In support of this analysis, both production and comprehension experiments show that children have more difficulty with object than with reflexive clitics (with more omissions in production and more erroneous judgments in sentences involving Principle B in comprehension). Concerning the morphological aspect, French subject and object pronouns agree in gender with their referent. We report serious difficulties with pronoun gender both in production and comprehension in children around the age of 4 (with nearly 30% errors in production and chance level judgments in comprehension), which tend to disappear by age 6. The distribution of errors further suggests that the masculine gender is processed as the default value. These findings provide further insights into the relationship between comprehension and production in the acquisition process. Dewey 150 Open Access - Licence nationale Cambridge University Press 108 Section de psychologie 71 false 736 Développement du langage et cognition 737 Perception et production de la parole 595 Psycholinguistique Applied psycholinguistics 31 d714f903-1b04-4b63-9a33-53e5bc08172c Article (Published version) Public pronouns_applied_psycholing.pdf 228608 application/pdf OA NATIONAL Private 2014-10-31 openAccess Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l'éducation / Section de psychologie

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The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension	Applied psycholinguistics			2010	696	382

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Baranzini, Lara