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

Contributors

Zesiger, Pascal Eric; Chillier-Zesiger, Laurence; Arabatzi, Marina; Baranzini, Lara; Cronel-Ohayon, Stéphany; Franck, Julie; Frauenfelder, Ulrich Hans; Hamann, Cornelia; Rizzi, Luigi

Published in

Applied psycholinguistics, no. 31, p. 571-603

Collection

  • Open Access - Licence nationale Cambridge University Press

Publication date

2010

Abstract

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.

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Citation (ISO format)

ZESIGER, Pascal Eric et al. The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension. In: Applied psycholinguistics, 2010, n° 31, p. 571–603. doi: 10.1017/S0142716410000147

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Article (Published version)
OA NATIONAL

Identifiers

Journal ISSN

0142-7164
800views
624downloads

Technical informations

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31/10/2013 16:35:00

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31/10/2013 16:35:00

Update

14/03/2023 20:38:11

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14/03/2023 20:38:11

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