Abstract for Isabelle Barriere's talk

The nature of first word combinations: Evidence from the comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement in toddlers exposed to French
Isabelle Barriere (Yeled v'Yalda Research Institute & RISLUS, CUNY Graduate Center)
October 16, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

A milestone is reached when a child has acquired the fundamental morphosyntactic relation known as subject-verb agreement found in most languages of the world. Former studies on the acquisition of French have shown that the productive use of subject-verb agreement involving forms other than 3rd person singular emerges at 31 months. Thirty month old children were found to match the appropriate verbal and visual stimuli in both the singular and plural conditions, according to the results of an Intermodal Looking Paradigm Task that involved a 3rd person Singular versus Plural in verbal contexts where the number-marking is solely mediated by the morphophonological process of (consonantal) liaison. In contrast the results obtained on 24 month olds in the same task do not show evidence of comprehension. These last results are taken as evidence that the abstract feature of number-marking instantiated by the 3rd person pronouns and liaison is in place in 30 month old but not 24 month old French-speaking children (Legendre et al., 2007). A second experiment investigated the sensitivity to 3rd person singular versus plural subject-verb agreement marked on verb endings in sixteen 24 month old children. A significant difference was obtained on the grammatical and ungrammatical sets, with children showing a preference for the grammatical sets. Although our results seem to suggest that sensitivity to subject-verb agreement (HPP task involving number marking of the definite article in the NP and ending of the verb) seems to emerge earlier than comprehension of the same relation (IPL task on consonantal contrasts between pronouns and verbs), it is unclear whether this order of acquisition is due to the different demands of the tasks or to the distinct sub-patterns of subject-verb agreement marking. From a theoretical perspective, this set of results suggests that emergence of the abstract principle that underpins subject-verb agreement precedes its productive use in spontaneous speech production.