Abstract for Phaedra Royle's talk

Acquisition of gender concord in French DPs: Spontaneous speech and elicitation data
Phaedra Royle (Université de Montréal)
May 6, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - ; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

I will present elicitation data for French size and color adjectives in noun phrases (DPs), which are early-acquired structures in children. French-speaking children aged 3-5 years participated in our study. Adjectives were elicited by means of puzzles designed for this task, as well as through spontaneous speech. We observed that French variable adjectives are produced with errors in the early stages of acquisition, especially in the context of feminine color DPs. I propose that the source of difficulty for feminine variable adjectives is the retrieval of a lexicalized form that is in competition with the masculine form denoting the same concept. I also discuss the linguistic concept of rules in relation to French variable adjectives, and how they can be more or less appropriate for the description of language acquisition.