Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach

Abstract

Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensions of the predicates (durativity and resultativity) in sentences where the verb could take five forms: infinitive, one imperfective past tense (imperfect, 'imparfait'), and three perfective past tenses (perfect 'passé composé', or its 'historic' form 'passé simple', and pluperfect 'plus-que-parfait'). Results show that 10-year-old children have not yet learned the 'adult' functions of verbal forms. The results of these two experiments are discussed in relation to current models of human cognition.