Early lexical, morphological and syntactic development in French: Some complex relations

Abstract

This paper presents fine-grained longitudinal analyses of one child's language production over the period of change from single to multiword utterances. For a better understanding of the developmental processes underlying this change, detailed distinctions in transitional phenomena were made and related to changes in other aspects of language: the quantity and composition of the vocabulary and the use the child makes of it, and the beginnings of grammatical knowledge. Results suggest the existence of two possible paths leading to the change from single to multiword speech. The conversational path, based on discoursegenerated Successive Single-Word Utterances where the child, functioning as a “regular” Single-word speaker, is led to produce a sequence of related words by replying to the adult, and the more general speaker's path, based on developments in the expression of recurrent communicative intentions/events. For this child, the two paths co-occur and seem complementary, both feeding into the change to come. Although prefixed additional elements appear along with the first multiword utterances, it is only when combinatorial speech is well-established that they become syntactically- motivatedfillers, word categories begin to show formal differences, and some verbs present incipient bound verbal morphology. This development may in turn produce changes in combinatorial speech. The developmental relations between the aspects of language studied here seem consistent with a spiral model of development, typically constructivist model in which a step taken in one domain promotes the taking of a new step in another, which may in turn promote further development in the former.