elision

Sun Feb 2 03:37:43 UTC 2003

Dear Christina,

A few remarks regarding your question and hopefully, some relevant references:

1.  The way you ask your question seems to assume that the child analyses 
"j(e)" and "entends" as two linguistic units.  However, from the point of 
view of the child they hear "jentends" and the first question to ask is the 
issue of the segmentation.  As far as I am aware there is no study which 
deals with this on the acquisition of French.

2.  This issue is of particular interest to 2 colleagues, Geraldine 
Legendre and Thierry Nazzi,  and myself: we have carried out a Preferential 
paradigm study on children's ability to treat the subject clitic as an 
agreement marker.  We have collected the data but haven't finished 
analysing it.  Contact me about this in about three months or so.

3.  I have carefully looked at SE cliticization for my PhD and used the 
misuse of the allomorph "se' in *il se ouvre" as opposed to "il s'ouvre" as 
a criterion of SE-productivity (following Allen, 1996, I assume that this 
constitutes strong evidence of productivity of a morpheme): there is one 
example of such a misuse mentioned ion Pierce , 1992 and in my data 
analysis of CHILDES French corpora (Leveille and Champaud) ana very large 
cross-sectional corpus of speech samples produced by 2 to 4 yeard olds 
(about 15 to 20 samples per age group: 2, 2;3, 2;6, Le Nornad, 1986 corpus) 
there is a maximum of 3 such instances.

4.  I am not sure your questions only concerns elision between subject+ 
verb , but if it concerns this phenomenon in general- or rather the 
pheonomenon of 'Liasion'- , then there is some work done by Chevrot and 
Fayol (1999)  and Wauquiers Gravelines (2002) (see full references 
below).  Chevrot and Fayol (1999) conclude from their study on the 
production of liaisons between determiners and real and nonce words that 
between 2 and 3 the /z/ which occur between the determiner and the nouns as 
in /lezaviõ/ (the planes) do not constitute a plural morpheme.  Although 
Wauquiers-Gravelines (2002) presents a slightly different account of the 
acquisition of the liaison in that she rejects a lexically-based learning 
process, she also concludes that until about 2, the determiners and the 
nouns which involve a liaison are not treated as separate linguistic units. 
I have had e-mail convesrations with Wauquiers-Gravelines whose work is 
based on 2 methodological proecedures: experimental data as well as 
analysis of speech corpora and she says she has not come across unadultlike 
forms such as " *je zarive" (which would come frome "i(l)zariv") (informal 
query), or "*il jariv" which would come from misegmentation based on 
"jariv".  Sophie Wauquier's e-mail is: wauquiers at wanadoo.fr.  I have also 
asked Cecile De Cat, re the occurrences of such formns in the York Corpus 
and it seems that if they exist they are very rare (informal query).  I 
can't find her e-mail right now, but you can find it on the web page of the 
York Linguistic department.

Chevrot & Fayol (2001) Acquisition of french Liaison and related child 
errors. In M.
Almgen, A. Barrenam M.J. Ezeizabarrena, I. Idziabal, B. MacWhinney (eds)
Proceedings of the 8th conference of the IASCL, San Sebastianm 1999, 760-774.
Pierce, A. (1992) Language acquisition and syntactic theory: a comparative 
analysis of
French and English child grammars. Kluwer: Dordrecht.

Wauquier-Gravelines (2002)  Realisms of constraints in the acquisition of 
liaisin in French.  Communication orale, NaPhC, Avril, Montréal.+_ aother 
publications, the list of which you may obtain by contacting her.

It is great to know that fellow researchers are interested in this phenomenon!

With best wishes,

Isabelle Barriere
Department of Cognitive Science
Johns Hopkins University
& Linguistics,
Department of Humanities
University of Hertfordshire

At 07:57 AM 2/2/2003 +0000, you wrote:
>you might find that they go from j'entends to je entends and back to 
>j'entends - though I've never heard a child use je entends.
>I haven't studied this aspect of French but from my daughters I had many 
>examples like the following where it seems that the liaison gives you a 
>clue to what is going on:
>
>one age:  c'est-a moi  and c'est pas-a moi (with liaison "t" and "s" in 
>second example)
>
>later:  c'est-a moi and c'est pa t-a moi  (where the negative has really 
>been added rather than a ready made phrase)
>
>later - back to correct
>
>just an anecdote but interesting
>Annette K-S
>
>
>(At 23:13 -0500 1/2/03, Cristina Dye wrote:
>>Dear Info CHILDES Members,
>>
>>
>>I am working on a project examining the first language acquisition of 
>>French and I am trying to find out at what age French children begin to 
>>show knowledge of phonological elision (e.g., je entends -> j'entends). 
>>Any suggestions or references would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>>Many thanks,
>>
>>Cristina Dye

At 07:57 AM 2/2/2003 +0000, Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith wrote:
>you might find that they go from j'entends to je entends and back to 
>j'entends - though I've never heard a child use je entends.
>I haven't studied this aspect of French but from my daughters I had many 
>examples like the following where it seems that the liaison gives you a 
>clue to what is going on:
>
>one age:  c'est-a moi  and c'est pas-a moi (with liaison "t" and "s" in 
>second example)
>
>later:  c'est-a moi and c'est pa t-a moi  (where the negative has really 
>been added rather than a ready made phrase)
>
>later - back to correct
>
>just an anecdote but interesting
>Annette K-S
>
>
>(At 23:13 -0500 1/2/03, Cristina Dye wrote:
>>Dear Info CHILDES Members,
>>
>>
>>I am working on a project examining the first language acquisition of 
>>French and I am trying to find out at what age French children begin to 
>>show knowledge of phonological elision (e.g., je entends -> j'entends). 
>>Any suggestions or references would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>>Many thanks,
>>
>>Cristina Dye
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20030201/98673aeb/attachment.htm>