This chapter focuses on young children’s experience of referential and nonreferential uses of noun phrases (NPs) in everyday dialogues. Our study of a corpus of interactions between adults and children aged 1;10 to 2;6 showed that the indeterminacy and instability that might characterise… read more
In early childhood education and care (ECEC), children do not participate in the same way and to the same extent in various kinds of interactions. One of the challenges for educators is to succeed in involving every child in the proposed activities, thereby enabling them to benefit from these… read more
This chapter focuses on the choice of referring expressions in adult-child dialogues, and particularly on the identification of formal and functional conditions promoting the uses of personal and demonstrative pronouns. The study is based on a corpus of 22 parent-child dyads. Children are aged… read more
During the language acquisition process children experience language in different interactional settings. In terms of child-directed speech, we argue that children are exposed to different models that vary according to different factors. This chapter aims at grasping some aspects of these… read more
Twenty-four dialogues between French-speaking children aged 1;10 to 2;6 and their more competent interlocutors were analyzed from the point of view of (1) the uses of referring expressions by both children and their interlocutors, according to the attentional and discursive status of the… read more
This last chapter undertakes a general discussion of the results presented in Chapters 2 to 10. After recalling the overall distribution of referring expressions in the data of toddlers (age 1;7 to 2;6) and older children (age 3;6 to 7;5), we review the impact of formal factors (syntactic… read more
This chapter gives a general overview of the dialogical, theoretical, and methodological framework of the studies presented in the book, and the implications of that framework for understanding the acquisition of referring expressions and children’s early skills in this domain. Section 1… read more
This chapter is aimed to assess the impact of speech genre on the use of referring expressions. We examined this impact in two corpora of mother-child dialogues (toddlers, ages 1;10–2;6 years and older children ages 4–7 years) via two separate studies. The first study showed that among the… read more
In this chapter, we examine the properties of filler syllables as transition forms in the development of referring expressions. In particular, we hypothesize that fillers are precursors of referring expressions. We focus on the distribution, the phonological form and the referential function of… read more
This chapter investigates the repertoire and the uses of referring expressions in natural dialogues of 28 French-speaking children, aged between 1;7 and 2;6 years old. We focus on three strong forms (nouns, strong demonstrative pronouns and strong personal pronouns) and three weak forms (clitic… read more
Based on a dialogic theoretical framework, this chapter explores the influence of speech genres and activities on the use of referring expressions. The study examines a corpus of 25 dialogues of French speaking children aged between 1;10 and 2;04 in various activities. Results show that referring… read more
First uses of personal pronouns are characterized by their variability and instability. Since the processes involved in reference to discourse entities and to speech roles do not overlap, the use of pronouns cannot merely be explained by grammatical factors. This chapter considers dialogue as both… read more