Chapter 11

Developing strategies for encoding additive and contrastive relations in French and German child narratives

Speakers of French and German differ in their preferred choice of information components for establishing contrastive and additive discourse relations. Whereas French speakers tend to relate and compare discourse entities to each other across utterances, German speakers prefer to relate and compare assertions. The current study explores at which age French and German children (ages 4, 7, and 10) acquire the preferred discourse organizational principles of their respective languages. In order to disentangle typical properties of children’s discourse at a certain age from features reflecting the acquisition of language-specific preferences, the same set of elicited production data is compared across languages and age groups. Results show that despite common developmental trends, the principles underlying additive and contrastive discourse relations in German are acquired earlier than those in French. Whereas the relatively uniform German pattern can be seen as a continuation of earlier stages of acquisition, the French pattern is slightly more complex: There is more variation in the input and the prototypical integration of the relevant devices requires certain morpho-syntactic structures to be mastered first. From age 7 onward, child learners of both languages hone in on their target language’s preferred discourse structure.