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A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase "la petite" followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a noun or a verb. We assigned the children to a noun condition or a verb condition. Before the test, those in the noun condition were exposed to sentences where "la petite" predicted nouns, and those in the verb condition to sentences where "la petite" predicted verbs. At testing, 3- to 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, from the verb condition looked at the verb interpretation longer than did the children in the noun condition. This suggests a progression in children's ability to rely on input to adapt their predictions in language comprehension.

Recent research investigating embedded stem priming effects with the masked priming paradigm and pseudoword primes (e.g., "quickify"--"quick") has shown that priming effects can be obtained even when the embedded target word is followed by a non-morphological ending (e.g., "quickald"--"quick"). Here we examine the specific nature of such priming effects by testing whether they are modulated by morphological family size. We reasoned that if the effects are driven by pre-lexical orthographic processing then they should not be influenced by the family size of the embedded target word. On the contrary, we found that embedded words having several morphologically related family members (e.g., "serpentoche"--"SERPENT" [English: "snakerel"--"SNAKE"]--"serpents," "serpentin," "serpentine," "serpenter," "serpentant") generated greater priming than embedded words having only the plural form in the morphological family (e.g., "dauphingri"-"DAUPHIN" [English: "dolphinald"--"DOLPHIN"]). We therefore conclude that embedded stem priming is at least partly driven by processing at the level of lexical and morpho-semantic representations.

The present study applies a multidimensional methodological approach to the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax. It focuses on evaluating the degree of productivity of an infrequent subject-verb agreement pattern in the early acquisition of French and considers the explanatory role played by factors such as input frequency, semantic transparency of the agreement markers, and perceptual factors in accounting for comprehension of agreement in number (singular vs. plural) in an experimental setting. Results on a pointing task involving pseudoverbs demonstrate significant comprehension of both singular and plural agreement in children aged 2;6. The experimental results are shown not to reflect input frequency, input marker reliability on its own, or lexically driven knowledge. We conclude that toddlers have knowledge of subject-verb agreement at age 2;6 which is abstract and productive despite its paucity in the input.

The main goal of this article is to study the respective role of language typology and context on the noun to verb asymmetry in caregiver speech. The speech of 20 French- and 20 Turkish-speaking mothers addressed to their children in two different situations (book-reading and toy-play) were analysed in terms of noun to verb ratio as well as in terms of object-oriented to action-oriented utterances ratio. Only a tendency to noun orientation was shown in French mothers. Both groups of mothers behave in the same ways in both contexts with more nouns and object-oriented utterances in the book-reading context vs more verbs and action-oriented utterances in toy-play. These results confirm a more important role of context on mothers' linguistic behaviours than language typology.

Dynamic analyses of language growth tell us how vocabulary and grammar develop and how the two might be intertwined. Analyses of growth curves between 17 and 42 months, based on longitudinal data for 34 children, revealed interesting patterns of vocabulary and grammatical developments. They showed that these patterns were nonlinear, but with coinciding peaks of growth, suggesting a bilateral relationship between acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. A more detailed analysis of specific components of vocabulary (nouns, verbs, grammatical words) and grammar showed that each followed its own developmental course, but that its growth rates were likely to be negatively or positively correlated with those of other components. For example, a faster rate for acquiring nouns coincided with a slower rate for verbs. Last, an assessment of intra-individual variability in three children showed that mean scores obscure individual profiles.

In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun ("la balle"/"the ball") or a target verb ("je mange"/"I ea"t). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word ("une balle""/a ball" or "on mange"/"they eat"), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (*"on balle"/"they ball" or *"une mange"/"a eat"). We showed that 18-month-olds exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a determiner and vice-versa for nouns. These results suggest that 18-month-olds already know noun and verb contexts. As a result, they might be able to exploit them to categorize unknown words and constrain their possible meaning (nouns typically refer to objects whereas verbs typically refer to actions).

According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns' gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4- to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender attribution choices on natural gender, they did not base them on phonology either: the masculine was the dominant choice. These results thus provide additional support to the "masculine as default" view of French nouns' gender acquisition proposed by the authors in an earlier study. The present article considers how the developmental conditions of children's initial computations might bias their tallies towards a higher type frequency for masculine nouns, which could contribute to launching this gender as the default.

Using a picture pointing task, this study examines toddlers' processing of phonological alternations that trigger sound changes in connected speech. Three experiments investigate whether 2;5- to 3-year-old children take into account assimilations--processes by which phonological features of one sound spread to adjacent sounds--for the purpose of word recognition (e.g., in English, "ten pounds" can be produced as "te[mp]ounds"). English toddlers ("n" = 18) show sensitivity to native place assimilations during lexical access in Experiment 1. Likewise, French toddlers ("n" = 27) compensate for French voicing assimilations in Experiment 2. However, French toddlers ("n" = 27) do not take into account a hypothetical non-native place assimilation rule in Experiment 3, suggesting that compensation for assimilation is already language specific. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)

Two grammatical classes are commonly distinguished in psycholinguistic research. The open-class includes content words such as nouns, whereas the closed-class includes function words such as determiners. A standing issue is to identify whether these words are retrieved through similar or distinct selection mechanisms. We report a comparative investigation of the allocation of attentional resources during the retrieval of words from these 2 classes. Previous studies used a psychological-refractory-period paradigm to establish that open-class word retrieval is supported by central attention mechanisms. We applied the same logic to closed-class word retrieval. French native speakers named pictures with determiner noun phrases while they concurrently identified the pitch of an auditory tone. The ease of noun and determiner retrieval was manipulated independently. Results showed that both manipulations affected picture naming and tone discrimination responses in similar ways. This suggests the involvement of central attentional resources in word production, irrespective of word class. These results argue against the commonly held hypothesis that closed-class retrieval is an automatic consequence of syntactic specific processes. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure, and 2 footnotes.)

This article examines noun-drop constructions in French-speaking children. French being intermediate between English (which rarely allows noun-drop) and Spanish (which freely allows it) with respect to the richness of their respective morphological systems, it provides a fertile testing ground for various agreement-based analyses of noun-drop. We conclude, along with Snyder, Senghas, & Inman (2001) that agreement is not a factor in the licensing of these constructions. Moreover, limitations on the occurrence of this phenomenon (i.e., not all adjective types allow it) in French lead us to propose that semantic, rather than syntactic, factors are responsible for noun-drop in French, i.e., partitivity and atomization (in the sense of Bouchard 2002). This in turn assigns the determiner a more important role than had previously been assumed in the licensing of noun-drop. Ultimately, our analysis illustrates how child language can be used to discriminate between competing analyses of a given syntactic process. (Contains 8 tables and 20 notes.)

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le" (the [subscript masculine]). The target and distractor expressed either shared or different grammatical and nongrammatical features (gender, number, and definiteness). A gender-facilitation effect was observed and attributed to noun processing. Crucially, across five experiments, distractors that shared a feature with the target determiner never resulted in longer naming latencies than distractors that were more different. These results indicate that activating related candidates is not detrimental for determiner retrieval, suggesting a noncompetitive mechanism of closed-class word selection. (Contains 11 tables, 3 figures, and 9 footnotes.)

Describes a set of questionnaires administered to 400 French speakers in France and Switzerland to study variation in the position of the adjective in a noun phrase. The first objective was to separate rigidly structured contexts from those affected by fluctuations, the second was to detect regularities and hesitations in individual behavior. (MES)

Although composing two words into a complex representation (e.g., “coffee cake”) is conceptually different from forming associations between a pair of words (e.g., “coffee, cake”), the brain regions supporting semantic composition have also been implicated for associative encoding. Here, we adopted a two-word magnetoencephalography (MEG) paradigm which varies compositionality (“French/Korean cheese” vs “France/Korea cheese”) and strength of association (“France/French cheese” vs “Korea/Korean cheese”) between the two words. We collected MEG data while 42 English speakers (24 females) viewed the two words successively in the scanner, and we applied both univariate regression analyses and multivariate pattern classification to the source estimates of the two words. We show that the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) and left middle temporal lobe (LMTL) are distinctively modulated by semantic composition and semantic association. Specifically, the LATL is mostly sensitive to high-association compositional phrases, while the LMTL responds more to low-association compositional phrases. Pattern-based directed connectivity analyses further revealed a continuous information flow from the anterior to the middle temporal region, suggesting that the integration of adjective and noun properties originated earlier in the LATL is consistently delivered to the LMTL when the complex meaning is newly encountered. Taken together, our findings shed light into a functional dissociation within the left temporal lobe for compositional and distributional semantic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The verb/noun dissociation has often involved the semantic/grammatical confound. We conducted two event-related potentials (ERPs) studies with the aim of minimizing this confound. In Experiment 1 participants named pictures depicting actions, with verbs or nouns and pictures depicting objects with nouns. In Experiment 2, participants named objects (nouns) or actions (verbs/nouns) from the same set of action pictures. Compatible with lexical-semantic processes, semantic category modulated waveform amplitudes and topographic patterns between 250 and 380 ms after picture-onset in Experiment 1. No such effects were observed in Experiment 2. No effects were found for grammatical class in both experiments suggesting that grammatical information is not mandatorily activated during lexical-semantic processes. Given the absence of dissociation when same pictures were used the results are described as feed-forward effects from visual to semantic processing, indicating differential neural networks for lexical selection of action and object words from their corresponding visual referents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, i.e., how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are put to use to solve attribution problems and contrast it with a simple “masculine as default” strategy. Elicited production data from three experiments, involving 312 4–10-year-old French children and 40 adult controls, were found compatible with this latter scenario and to provide only scant support for the former one. Second, we argue that previous studies have overestimated French children''s gender agreement abilities, and that French children''s ability to make the article and the adjective agree can be assumed from age 7 onwards, but not before. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Subjective frequency and imageability estimates for a sample of 3,600 French nouns were collected from two independent groups of 72 young adults each. Both groups received standard instructions and provided their ratings on a 7-point scale. The timing, sequencing, presentation of lexical stimuli, and recording of responses were controlled by a computer. All estimates of internal consistency and test-retest reliability (≥.98) confirm the high level of precision and reliability of the ratings. Correlations with ratings drawn from similar studies were found to be positive and significant for subjective frequency (r ≥ .85) and for imageability (r ≥ .69). Subjective frequency was positively and significantly correlated with objective frequency estimates drawn from 10 different sources (r = .42). Subjective frequency and imageability were significantly correlated (r = .26), a relationship that was driven primarily by a sudden drop in imageability ratings for words with a subjective frequency rating below 2.5. The methodological implications of these findings are discussed. The ratings can be downloaded as supplemental materials from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the complicated issue of attribution of gender in French nouns. Firstly, it presents a range of views on how native speakers address noun gender allocation, plus some insight into why they are accurate with most, but by no means all, gender attributions. Secondly, the paper explains some of the inconsistencies in noun gender allocation and challenges the value of a system which has long been discarded by several other languages. Thirdly, it explains the confusion noun gender allocation presents for students and introduces a refreshingly simple, but effective, system to help. Finally, the paper concludes that, because mastering the gender of every noun is all but impossible, not only for learners, but also for native speakers, the best approach for students is to master the strategy presented in this paper, and for teachers not to penalise gender errors too harshly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a corpus-based study of the (restricted) modification patterns of predicatively used bare nouns in French (e.g . Je suis bon catholique'I am a good Catholic'). These are 'truly' bare in that they do not rely on a covert determiner. The aim of the paper is to determine which modification patterns are allowed and to provide a semantic-functional explanation. Further, on the basis of this study, some conclusions can be drawn both about the categorial status of the bare predicative noun and about the internal architecture of type specification, the innermost functional layer within the NP. More specifically, the study of bare nouns leads to the identification of several lower-level slots that are independent of the instantiation of a particular nominal entity in conceptual space. These are to be distinguished from higher-level modifiers. To end, some additional syntactic contexts are provided in which bare nouns occur. These display identical restrictions with respect to modification, but differ in the array of lexical heads they allow for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]