Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction in French: a usage-based account
Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which interrelates a number of different issues: the acquisition of phonological alternations, the segmentation of new words, the long-term stabilization of the word form in the lexicon and the formation of item-based constructions. According to this scenario, children favour the presence of initial CV syllables when segmenting stored chunks of speech of the type word1-liaison-word2 (les arbres 'the trees' is segmented as /le/+/zarbr/). They cope with the variation of the liaison in the input by memorizing multiple exemplars of the same word2 (/zarbr/, /narbr/). They learn the correct relations between the word1s and the word2 exemplars through exposure to the well-formed sequence (un+/narbr/, deux+/zarbr/). They generalize the relation between a word1 and a class of word2 exemplars beginning with a specific liaison consonant by integrating this information into an item-based schema (e.g. un+/nX/, deux+/zX/). This model is based on the idea that the segmentation of new words and the development of syntactic schemas are two aspects of the same process.
Source: Journal of Child Language
Institutions: Institut Universitaire de France, Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3, Laboratoire de Linguistique et Didactique des Langues Etrangères et Maternelles, Université d'Orléans, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive, Université Blaise Pascal
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2158049412