2018 Sat Poster 6552

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Suffixal Subject-Verb Number Agreement: The Development of Comprehension in French-learning Toddlers from 30 to 36 Months
E. Koulaguina, G. Legendre, I. Barrière, I. Menu, E. Sivakumar, T. Nazzi

Comprehension of Subject-Verb number agreement appears late (between 3;6 and 6 years) in all languages tested (English, Spanish, German) except French, where comprehension of prefixal, liaison-based agreement (e.g, [il_ariv]/[iz_ariv] ‘he/they arrive’; Legendre et al., 2010) was found at 2;6. Cue reliability strength and processing of the phonological liaison consonant were hypothesized as likely sources of facilitation (Legendre et al., 2014; Barrière et al., 2016). Here, we examined a second SV agreement system in French, which is exclusively suffixal and morpho-phonologically irregular (e.g., [il li]/[il liz] ‘he/they read).

We hypothesized that early comprehension of liaison-based agreement by 2;6 would foster cross-morpheme facilitation (Rispoli et al., 2012), leading to earlier comprehension of this suffixal agreement system in French than in languages relying exclusively on suffixal agreement.

A pointing task tested comprehension of suffixal agreement in 30- (N = 16) and 36-month-old (N = 16) French-learning toddlers. In 8 trials, children watched 8 pairs of videos, each related to an action corresponding to a different frequent French verb, performed by two boys (plural videos) versus one of two boys (singular). An experimenter then uttered a singular or plural sentence, asking the child to point to the matching video. Results on mean percentage of correct responses, calculated for verbs known by children according to parental report (the average of 8 known out of 8 tested verbs for 30-month-olds, and 7.88 for 36-month-olds), show that 36-month-olds (60.05%) performed significantly above chance level, t(15) = 2.54, p= .02, but not 30-month-olds (51.5%), t(15) = .54, p = .6. An independent-samples 2-tailed t– test revealed a marginally significant difference between the two age groups, t(30) = – 1.77, p = .086. To explore potential differences in number processing, a Mixed ANOVA with number (singular vs. plural) as within-subject factor and age as between-subject factor showed no significant main effect of age, number, or their interaction.

These results reveal that, in French, comprehension of suffixal number SV agreement is in place early, by age 3. This emergence happens half a year later than the emergence of the French prefixal agreement system (by 2;6 years of age), confirming the advantage of the prefixal system. Yet, this acquisition of suffixal agreement in French happens earlier than in any other language with suffixal-only agreement tested so far, expanding the cross-morpheme facilitation hypothesis to another language and to comprehension.

References

Barrière, I., Goyet, L., Kresh, S. Nazzi, T., & Legendre, G. (2016). Uncovering productive morphosyntax in French-learning toddlers: A multidimensional methodology perspective. Journal of Child Language, 43 (5), 1131-1157.

Legendre, G., Barrière, I., Goyet, L., & Nazzi, T. (2010). Comprehension of infrequent subject-verb agreement forms: evidence from French-learning children. Child Development, 81(6), 1859-1875.

Legendre, G., Culbertson, J., Zaroukian, E., Hsin, L., Barrière, I., & Nazzi, T. (2014). Is children’s comprehension of subject–verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish. Lingua, 144, 21-39.

Rispoli, M., Hadley, P., & Holt, J. (2012). Sequence and system in the development of tense and agreement. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 55, 1007-1021.