The emergence of grammaticality in children : Cognitive, linguistic and conversational factors – EMERGRAM

The principal aim of the project is to identify early signs of grammaticality in children learning French, English and Spanish, and to provide an account of the driving forces underlying this development. The originality of this project lies in the alliance of longitudinal and experimental data from the same children and in the exploration of specific characteristics of the input and of conversation as factors in this development. This project is the natural prolongation of research work that has occupied most of the participants in the past several years. Researchers are from France as well as from the United States, Spain and Mexico. They include senior researchers, some widely renowned in this field of research, as well as younger active researchers and doctoral students. Context When children start producing meaningful words, at the end of the first - beginning of the second year - they typically speak in single word utterances. Several months usually go by before children produce multiword speech showing signs of incipient grammatical organization. By age three typically developing children appear to have at their disposal the basic tools for producing grammatically appropriate and relatively complex utterances. Understanding the normally-occurring developments of the second and third years is fundamental for a theory of language acquisition in general, and for a better understanding of language impairments. A development that is particularly crucial in this period concerns the initial grammaticality of children's utterances, which provides evidence that on top of communicating meanings and intentions, children start to deal with the way language is organized as a system. The study of the emergence of grammaticality has been tackled in several different ways since the advent of modern developmental psycholinguistics using acquisition models inspired by Chomskian generativist tradition or by a constructivist approach with emphasis on cognitive, or socio-cognitive, mechanisms of knowledge growth. The former emphasizes the language specific nature of knowledge, governed by abstract and general rules. Children are supposed very early to rely on relatively complex, productive systems, and on general knowledge about the existence of categories and verbal structures (inflection dependencies, number and kinds of licensed arguments). The latter proposes that language knowledge is, at least in the initial period, learned in a more item-specific manner and constructed piecemeal, mostly on the basis of children's cognitive elaboration of the speech they hear and interact with. For example, is differentiation between nouns and verbs already part and parcel of children's ideas about language, or is it the result of the successive integrations of fragments of knowledge about the behavior of specific words and of their combination in different contexts? Do children immediately generalize inflectional markings or use them in a restricted fashion before generalizing them across the board (e.g. Pizzuto & Caselli, 1992; Gathercole, Sebastian Soto, 1999; Rojas Nieto, 2003)? Do they use certain verbs only with particular argument structures without necessary consistency across verbs of similar kinds ? (e.g. Tomasello, 1992, 2003). Can the nature of adults' verb uses explain phenomena like these, as well as the phenomenon known as single-form verb morphology that in children usually precedes contrastive uses for the same verb? Nowadays, researchers dispose of more sophisticated analytical tools (technical and theoretical). Moreover, theories are faced with an incipient body of more precise studies of early acquisition that tend to reveal developmental subtleties as well as acquisitional complexities unknown before. This new state of the art has relaunched the debate from a new perspective. Objectives Our project intends to contribute in an original way to this ongoing debate by studying early signs of grammaticality in children's .