Conference by Dr. Phaedra Royle
Development of linguistic competence in French-speaking children
Traditional psycholinguistic models make distinctions between the acquisition of regular and irregular verbs (ate vs. jumped) (Pinker, 1999; Ullman, 2004). This approach works well enough for English but are lacking for Romance languages where more than two conjugation groups coexist in the grammar (Albright, 2002; Clahsen, Aveledo, & Roca, 2002; Say & Clahsen, 2002 ; Royle, Beritognolo, & Bergeron, 2012).
This presentation will show native and non-native French children’s sensitivity to verb conjugation groups in French and their usefulness for our understanding of the acquisition of morphological rules. Additional data from children with specific language impairment with a lack of sensitivity to these distinctions will help us understand what might be a basis for some of their linguistic difficulties.
Phaedra Royle, Ph.D.
Faculty of Medicine – School of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology
University of Montreal