Provided by Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive
Psychology of Language and Communication 2003, Vol. 7, No. 1
EDY VENEZIANO
Universite Paris V - CNRS, Paris
THE EMERGENCE OF NOUN AND VERB CATEGORIES
IN THE ACQUISITION OF FRENCH*
This paper considers whether the child’s early vocabulary shows signs of being organized into
word categories. Two main kinds of evidence are looked for: i. differential production of fillers
(referred to here more neutrally as Prefixed Additional Elements); ii. relevant phonomorphologi-
cal variation for verb-words, and only in them. Results of analyses of natural speech production
provided by the longitudinal studies of two French acquiring children followed between the ages
of 1;3 and 2;3, show that there is a first period in which words seem to constitute one, formally
undifferentiated, set. Differentiation between noun-words and verb-words appears progressively,
as evidenced by the differential occurrence of PAEs in prenominal and in preverbal positions, and
in the appearance of phonomorphologically relevant variations only in words that are verbs in the
language. Looking at connected aspects of language, other phenomena are observed to occur at
the same time, in particular, a significant increase in the production of multiword speech, that
becomes the dominant way of expression.
1. Introduction
The distinction between nouns and verbs is present formally in many languages
and, where it exists, is deeply embedded in the language system. It determines the way
words are allowed to follow each other, the contexts in which a word is allowed to
appear, the transformations that words can or should undergo and also the inferences
that one can make on the meaning of words encountered for the first time (e.g. Surugue,
1984).
The question I will address in this paper is when do children start to produce
nouns and verbs. On a first level one could say that children produce nouns and verbs
when they use words that, like ball and fall, are nouns and verbs in the language.
Studies that have taken the grammatical categories of the adult language as a criterion,
have pointed out that children’s lexical repertoire contains more nouns than verbs and
that there might be an initial „bias” towards the acquisition of nouns (e.g., Gentner,
. . .
Address for correspondence: Edy Veneziano, ?????????????????????????????????????????????????.
E-mail: [email protected]