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<font face="Times New Roman, Times">Dear Christina, <br><br>
A few remarks regarding your question and hopefully, some relevant
references:<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 /<i>z</i>/ which occur between the
determiner and the nouns as in /<i>le<b>z</b>aviõ</i>/ (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: </font>wauquiers@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.<br><br>
<br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times">Chevrot & Fayol (2001)
Acquisition of french Liaison and related child errors. In M. <br>
Almgen, A. Barrenam M.J. Ezeizabarrena, I. Idziabal, B. MacWhinney (eds)
<br>
Proceedings of the 8th conference of the IASCL, San Sebastianm 1999,
760-774.<br>
Pierce, A. (1992)<i> Language acquisition and syntactic theory: a
comparative analysis of <br>
French and English child grammars. </i>Kluwer: Dordrecht.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
It is great to know that fellow researchers are interested in this
phenomenon!<br><br>
With best wishes,<br><br>
Isabelle Barriere<br>
Department of Cognitive Science<br>
Johns Hopkins University<br>
& Linguistics,<br>
Department of Humanities<br>
University of Hertfordshire<br><br>
<br>
</font>At 07:57 AM 2/2/2003 +0000, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>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.<br>
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:<br><br>
one age: c'est-a moi and c'est pas-a moi (with liaison
"t" and "s" in second example)<br><br>
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)<br><br>
later - back to correct<br><br>
just an anecdote but interesting<br>
Annette K-S<br><br>
<br>
(At 23:13 -0500 1/2/03, Cristina Dye wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Dear Info CHILDES
Members,<br><br>
<br>
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.<br><br>
Many thanks,<br><br>
Cristina Dye</blockquote></blockquote><br><br>
<br>
At 07:57 AM 2/2/2003 +0000, Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith
wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>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.<br>
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:<br><br>
one age: c'est-a moi and c'est pas-a moi (with liaison
"t" and "s" in second example)<br><br>
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)<br><br>
later - back to correct<br><br>
just an anecdote but interesting<br>
Annette K-S<br><br>
<br>
(At 23:13 -0500 1/2/03, Cristina Dye wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Dear Info CHILDES
Members,<br><br>
<br>
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.<br><br>
Many thanks,<br><br>
Cristina Dye</blockquote></blockquote></html>