Cover not available
Part of
Lexical Polycategoriality: Cross-linguistic, cross-theoretical and language acquisition approaches
Edited by Valentina Vapnarsky and Edy Veneziano
[Studies in Language Companion Series 182] 2017
► pp. 413–442

Semantic discrimination of Noun/Verb categories in French children aged 1;6 to 2;11

| Modyco, INSERM, CNRS & Université Paris Nanterre
| Université Grenoble Alpes, ICLEA4 (GREMUTS)
This study assesses the part played by semantics in the emergence of grammatical categories in child language. Based on basic, real-world properties, we analyze each of the first nouns and verbs used by three French-speaking children, and code them along six semantic dimensions – animacy, concreteness, determination, distance, motion and number. We use multiple correspondence analyses and hierarchical clustering to model the categories of child language that emerge based on the above semantic dimensions. We then compare them with adult noun and verb categories. Our results show that a gradual organization of meaning takes place during language development, with a degree of variation from one child to the other, especially in the early steps.
Keywords: semantic categorization, early language acquisition, grammatical categories (Noun, Verb)
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Learning semantic and syntactic categories
  • 3.Young children’s acquisition of grammatical categories
  • 4.Selecting semantic characteristics
  • 5.Analysis of child data
  • 6.First results using unidimensional analysis
  • 7.Multiple correspondence analysis and hierarchical clustering
  • 8.Analysis for Anaé
    • 8.1.Anaé up to age 2;0
    • 8.2.Anaé from age 2;1
    • 8.3.Results for Anaé
  • 9.Analyses for Antoine and Théophile
  • 10.Reanalysis using more than two clusters
  • 11.General discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.182.14par
References (60)
References
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. 1982. Functionalist approaches to grammar. In Language Acquisition - The State of the Art, E. Wanner & L.R. Gleitman (eds), 173–218. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Bassano, D. 2000. Early development of nouns and verbs in French: Exploring the interface between lexicon and grammar. Journal of Child Language 27(3): 521–559. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernal, S., Lidz, J., Millotte, S. & Christophe, A. 2007. Syntax constrains the acquisition of verb meaning. Language Learning and Development 3(4): 325–341. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bird, H., Lambon, R.M.A., Patterson, K. & Hodges, J. 2000. The rise and fall of frequency and imageability: Noun and verb production in semantic dementia. Brain and Language 73(1): 17–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Black, M. & Chiat, S. 2003. Noun-verb dissociations: A multi-faceted phenomenon. Journal of Neurolinguistics 16(2–3): 231–250. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bloom, L. 1970. Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
. 1991. Language Development from Two to Three. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Braine, M.D.S. 1976. Children’s first word combinations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 41(1): 98–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Breedin, S., Saffran, E.M. & Coslett, H.B. 1994. Reversal of the concreteness effect in a patient with semantic dementia. Cognitive Neuropsychology 11(6): 617–660. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, R.W. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Budwig, N. 1995. A Developmental-functionalist Approach to Child Language. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Casasola, M., Bhagwat, J. & Ferguson, K. 2006. Precursors to verb learning: Infant’s understanding of motion events. In Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs, K. Hirsh-Pasek & R.M. Golinkoff (eds), 160–190. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chapman, R.S. 2000. Children’s language learning: An interactionist perspective. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 41(1): 33–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, E.V. 1982. The young word-maker: A case study of innovation in the child’s lexicon. In Language Acquisition: The State of the Art, E. Wanner & L.R. Gleitman (eds), 390–425. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
. 1987. The principle of contrast: A constraint on language acquisition. In Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, B. MacWhinney, (ed.), 1–33. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Croft, W. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, W. & Cruse, D.A. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Desagulier, G. In press. Visualizing distances in a set of near synonyms: Rather, quite, fairly, and pretty. In Polysemy and Synonymy: Corpus Methods and Applications in Cognitive Linguistics [Human Cognitive Processing 43], D. Glynn & J. Robinson (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Divjak, D. & Gries, S.T. 2006. Ways of trying in Russian: Clustering behavioral profiles. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2(1): 23–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evans, N. & Levinson, S.C. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(05): 429–448. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. 1982. Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Language Development, S.A. Kuczak (ed.), 22: 67–88. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Gelman, S.A. & Gottfried, G.M. 1996. Children’s causal explanations of animate and inanimate motion. Child Development 67:1970–1987. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. 2006. Why verbs are hard to learn. In Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs, K. Hirsch-Pasek & R. Golinkoff (eds), 544–564. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gleitman, L.R. 1990. The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1: 3–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A.E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
. 2003. Constructions: A new theorical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(5): 219–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Mervis, C.B., Frawley, W. & Parillo, M. 1995. Lexical principles can be extended to the acquisition of verbs. In Beyond Names for Things: Young Children's Acquisition of Verbs, M. Tomasello & W. Merriman (eds), 185–222. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Hockett, C.F. 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203: 88–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Husson, F., Lê, S. & Pagès, J. 2011. Exploratory Multivariate Analysis by Example Using R. Boca Raton FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, R. 1987. The Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, J. 1968. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macnamara, J. 1984. Names for Things: A Study in Human Learning. Cambridge MA: Bradford.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. 1999. The Emergence of Language. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M.P. 1976. The Use of Definite and Indefinite Reference in Young Children: An Experimental Study of Semantic Acquisition. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Morgenstern, A. & Parisse, C. 2012. The Paris Corpus. Journal of French Language Studies 22: 7–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38(1–2, Serial No. 149). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ninio, A. 2006. Kernel vocabulary and Zipf’s law in maternal input to syntactic development. BUCLD 30: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia & C. Zaller (eds), 423–431. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. 1984. Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories. In Culture Theory: Mind, Self, and Emotion, R. Shweder & R. LeVine (eds), 276–320. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Olguin, R. & Tomasello, M. 1993. Twenty-five-month-old children do not have a grammatical category of verb. Cognitive Development 8(3): 245–272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Payne, T.E. 1997. Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
. 1994. How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics? Lingua 92: 377–410. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rakison, D.H. 2005. Developing knowledge of motion properties in infancy. Cognition 96: 183–214. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rossi, C. & Parisse, C. 2012. Categories in the making: Assessing the role of semantics in the acquisition of noun and verb categories. Journal of French Language Studies 22: 37–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Slater, A. 1989. Visual memory and perception in early infancy. In Infant Development, A. Slater & G. Bremner (eds), 43–71. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Slobin, D.I. 2001. Form-function relations: How do children find out what they are? In Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (eds), 406–449. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. 2000. Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74: 209–253. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Boston MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
. 2004. What kind of evidence could refute the UG hypothesis? Studies in Language 28: 642–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. & Olguin, R. 1993. Twenty-three-month-old children have a grammatical category of noun. Cognitive Development 8(4): 451–464. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Veneziano, E. 2003. The emergence of noun and verb categories in the acquisition of French. Psychology of Language and Communication 7(1): 23–36.Google Scholar
Veneziano, E., Parisse, C. & Delacour, A. 2010. The early comprehension of noun-verb distinction in French. An experimental method. Paper presened at the International Conference on Infant Studies , Baltimore, USA, March.
Veneziano, E. & Parisse, C.. in press. Retrieving meaning from noun and verb grammatical contexts: Interindividual variation among 2- to 4-year-old French-speaking children In Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, Contexts, and Learners, M. Hickmann, E. Veneziano & H. Jisa (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Veneziano, E. & Sinclair, H. 2000. The changing status of “filler syllables” on the way to grammatical morphemes. Journal of Child Language 27(3): 461–500. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Veneziano, E., Sinclair, H. & Berthoud-Papandropoulou, I. 1990. From one word to two words: repetition patterns on the way to structured speech. Journal of Child Language 17: 633–650. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D.P., Lewis, W. & Garrett, M.F. 2004. Representing the meanings of object and action words: The featural and unitary semantic space hypothesis. Cognitive Psychology 48(4): 422–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zingeser, L.B. & Berndt, R.S. 1990. Retrieval of nouns and verbs in agrammatism and anomia. Brain and Language 39(1): 14–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar