Abstract
Context. Few standardized tools exist to assess vocabulary, syntax and grammar in French. Objective. This study presents a tool, made of four entertaining puzzles, that can quickly assess proficiency in the production of noun phrases with color or size adjectives. Hypothesis: We'll observe a consolidation of adjective agreement between the ages of 3 and 6, but a mastery of gender assignment in the youngest children. Method. Data from 190 French-speaking children aged 3 to 9 are presented. We report results on four tasks of increasing difficulty involving adjectives of color and size (e.g., le petit canard vert ‘the small green duck’). Results. Our results enable one to situate a child's performance in relation to his or her peers, in a variety of ways. Risk thresholds, success rates and typical errors for each one-year age range are presented, as well as at what ages the tasks should be passed by a majority of children. Morphological or syntactic errors typical (or not) of children growing up in French-speaking environments are also reported. Conclusion. These quantitative and descriptive benchmarks can inform clinical assessment of speech-language therapists, whether with the task or from language corpora, and will inform reasoning leading to clinical decisions.
Published Version
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