NOUN AND VERB CATEGORIES IN THE ACQUISITION OF FRENCH
33
mate the grammatical morphemes one would expect to find in the positions (for exam-
ple, /a'tεt/, for /la'tεt/, ‘the head’). This is particularly the case for the prenominal
positions, where 82% of the PAEs are approximations of expected morphemes; it is
somewhat less so for the preverbal position, where the corresponding figure is 49%.
This finding contrasts with that found at the previous sessions when, as mentioned
above, these kinds of errors would have been high if PAEs were considered to be
approximations of grammatical morphemes.
At 2;2, errors of omissions are almost non-existent in prenominal position (only
3%) and they are greatly reduced in preverbal position (18%). At this age, 94% of the
PAEs produced in prenominal position are either approximations or well-formed re-
productions of grammatical morphemes that could be found there. The corresponding
figure for the preverbal positions is 70%, not as high as for the prenominal position,
but considerably higher than that found at the previous sessions.
5.2.1. Articulated speech
The beginnings of differentiation between words in terms of grammatical catego-
ries correspond to a change in multiword speech. At 1;10, C’s utterances are domi-
nantly multiword, and represent 72% of all the communicative intentions identified.
This constitutes a great change relative to the previous session, recorded one month
earlier, where less than 37% of C’s communicative intentions were expressed by
multiword utterances. At 2;2 this percentage grows somewhat further and it repre-
sents 82% of the communicative acts produced by C (see Veneziano, 1999, for an
extended analysis of the relation between combinatorial speech and measures of the
grammaticalization of the child’s production).
6. Conclusions
Results presented above strongly suggest that there is a first period where the two
children do not differentiate words into formal categories. Noun-words and verb-words
that are part of the children’s vocabulary from the very early sessions of the study do
not seem to differentiate in other ways than by their meaning. They do not fall into
distinct classes of words having different privileges or constraints of occurrence. For
several months, words seem to constitute one formally undifferentiated set13. It is a
pre-categorial, and pre-morphological period (see also Kilani-Schoch & Dressler, 2000,
on this point), characterized by a non-grammatically-motivated organization of the
phonoprosodic regularities of the language (see Veneziano & Sinclair, 2000, for more
details on this latter hypothesis).
The difference between noun-words and verb-words appears to come about pro-
gressively, and manifests itself in different ways and at different levels.
It is found at the level of PAE production, where PAEs are produced differentially
for words that are nouns and for words that are verbs in the language.
13 This position rejoins that of authors working in the history of languages (see, for example, Tyvaert,
2002).