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Lexical Polycategoriality: Cross-linguistic, cross-theoretical and language acquisition approaches
Edited by Valentina Vapnarsky and Edy Veneziano
[Studies in Language Companion Series 182] 2017
► pp. 381–411

Noun and Verb categories in acquisition

Evidence from fillers and inflectional morphology in French-acquiring children

| MoDyCo & LPPS, Université Paris Descartes & CNRS

Our analyses suggest that early fillers are premorphological. They help children realize phonoprosodic features, and reflect the distributional regularities of child-directed speech, but are not used to differentiate nouns from verbs, a differentiation that starts to show up a few months after their appearance. The analysis of verbal inflectional morphology confirms these results, showing that, at first, verbs are not treated differently from nouns. The results of a comprehension task administered longitudinally to one of the children are also reported. In this task the child has to attribute an action or object meaning to homophonous or nonce words on the sole basis of the grammatical context in which they occur. The more mature understanding of the distinction between noun and verb frames required by the comprehension task sheds further light on the early psychological reality of Nouns and Verbs for young children.

Keywords: French acquisition, word categories, fillers, nouns, verbs, acquisition, French verbal inflectional morphology, production, comprehension
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Nouns and Verbs in early language acquisition
  • 2.Nouns and Verbs in oral French
  • 3.Studying the emergence of word categories
  • 4.The data
    • 4.1The longitudinal studies of children’s production
    • 4.2Data collection and transcription
  • 5.Fillers
    • 5.1Interpretations of fillers
    • 5.2Three periods in the development of fillers
    • 5.3The quantitative development of fillers in the longitudinal studies
    • 5.4Evidence for the premorphological status of early fillers
      • 5.4.1Changes in the phonoprosodic structure of the child’s overall lexical production
      • 5.4.2The child’s renditions of monosyllabic and multisyllabic target words
      • 5.4.3Are early fillers produced differentially according to the class of the word they precede?
        • 5.4.3.1Differentiation between Nouns and Verbs in CDS
        • 5.4.3.2Differentiation between prenominal and preverbal positions by early filler production
    • 5.5Fillers: Summary
  • 6.The emergence of inflectional morphology
  • 7.A case study of the relation between production and comprehension
    • 7.1Procedure and material
    • 7.2Results
  • 8.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.182.13ven
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