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Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction in French: a usage-based account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

JEAN-PIERRE CHEVROT ,
CELINE DUGUA  and
MICHEL FAYOL
JEAN-PIERRE CHEVROT*
Affiliation:
LIDILEM, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France
CELINE DUGUA
Affiliation:
LLL/CORAL, Université d'Orléans, France
MICHEL FAYOL
Affiliation:
LAPSCO, Université Blaise Pascal & CNRS, Clermont-Ferrand, France
*
*Address for correspondence: Jean-Pierre Chevrot, Université Stendhal, BP 25, 38040, Grenoble cedex, France. e-mail: jpchevrot@wanadoo.fr
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Abstract

In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which interrelates a number of different issues: the acquisition of phonological alternations, the segmentation of new words, the long-term stabilization of the word form in the lexicon and the formation of item-based constructions. According to this scenario, children favour the presence of initial CV syllables when segmenting stored chunks of speech of the type word1-liaison-word2 (les arbres ‘the trees’ is segmented as /le/+/zarbr/). They cope with the variation of the liaison in the input by memorizing multiple exemplars of the same word2 (/zarbr/, /narbr/). They learn the correct relations between the word1s and the word2 exemplars through exposure to the well-formed sequence (un+/narbr/, deux+/zarbr/). They generalize the relation between a word1 and a class of word2 exemplars beginning with a specific liaison consonant by integrating this information into an item-based schema (e.g. un+/nX/, deux+/zX/). This model is based on the idea that the segmentation of new words and the development of syntactic schemas are two aspects of the same process.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , June 2009 , pp. 557 - 596
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We should like to thank Ann Peters for the initial impetus she gave to this work as well as Marie-Hélène Côté, Bernard Laks, Yves Charles Morin and Sophie Wauquier-Gravelines for the interest they have shown in it. We would also like to thank the referees and the associate editor for their revealing and constructive comments.

References

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