Developmental Markers of Pre-schoolers' Temporal and Causal Connectivity in Two Discourse Contexts: Data from the French Language.

Abstract

The goal of this study is to investigate the acquisition of causal relations with parce que 'because' and temporal relations with quand 'when' by children between age 3 and 5 We aim at identifying whether different discourse type, conversation and narration, allow children to use quand and parce que with different semantic functions and in different syntactic contexts. For this purpose, we conducted a corpus study on 90 children from the corpus TCOF. We extracted 330 utterances with parce que and 116 with quand produced by children. To compare whether the different syntactic and semantic properties of these utterances were due to a difference in their input, we also analyzed the utterances with quand and parce que produced by the adults. The semantic values were coded following the frameworks of Debaisieux (Revue Sémant Pragmatique 15:51-67, 2004; in: Debaisieux (ed) Analyses linguistiques sur corpus: subordination et insubordination en français, editions Lavoisier, Paris, 2013) and Benzitoun (in: Debaisieux (ed) Analyses linguistiques sur corpus: subordination et insubordination en français, editions Lavoisier, Paris, 2013). We found that (i) children produce quand and parce que in different syntactic contexts and different semantic values depending on the discourse type, (ii) there is a correlation between the properties of the child and adult utterances in both contexts and (iii) children's repetitions play an important role in the development of quand and parce que, and (iv) the number of identical repetitions is higher at age 5 in narrations than in younger age groups. We explain this result by narrative input being too complex for younger children to be able to actively use it for their own speech production. Narrative input is therefore more helpful for the language development of older children.