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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.ozh0d1

>

Where these data come from
Lexical units and stored chunks : perspective from child to adult

Abstract

Studying the liaison in French and childish mistakes it entails (un nami, un zami) offers a unique perspective on the formation of lexical representations. Recent work (Chevrot and al., 2007; Dugua and al, 2009;.. Chevrot and al, forthcoming) corroborated a model (Chevrot et al., 2009) reflecting the developmental stages during which segmentation of nouns that are preceded by a liaison. We have implemented during this PhD, three empirical approaches to examine the hypotheses which emerge from this model.Observing 18094 déterminant-noun groups from a corpus of 118 hours of speech addressed to five children between 1 and 3 years reveals three trends: 86% contain a noun with an initial consonant (un garçon), the liaison (un ami) appears only in 5% of NG's [for "Noun-Groups"], the consonants which are attached to the initial vowel of nouns are mainly the liaisons / n /, / z /, / t / or the elision / l / (l’ami). The scarcity of the liaison is consistent with the complexity of acquiring it. The prevalence of nouuns with an initial consonant in the input is compatible with children's tendency to match the initial of the name with a consonant and thus to produce segmentations like / zami /, / nami / or / lami / for the word ami. This study has confirmed one of the three hypothesis of the model.A chronometer experiment on 60 5-6 years old children shows that they have stored in their lexicon as well variants like / nami / and / zarbr / for nouns ami and arbre, as frequent sequences containing these variants (un-ami, des-arbres). The same study on 36 adults indicatesthat they store in their lexicon entire sequences, without finding any trace of these variants.Finally, we explored the hypothesis of Morin & Kaye (1982)which suggested that the liaison / z / had a special status : indeed, it seems to be written in our lexicon as a morpheme of the plural form. Therefore, it would benefit from an even more abstract encoding, morphologically.These results are discussed from the perspective of theories based on the common use (Tomasello, 2003) wich states that lexicon consists of units with varying lengths and levels of abstraction.

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