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Grammatical and situational aspect in French: a developmental study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2002

MARIE LABELLE
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
LUCIE GODARD
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
CATHERINE-MARIE LONGTIN
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal

Abstract

We study the ability of children to provide an appropriate continuation for a stimulus sentence, taking into account the joint demands of situational aspect and grammatical aspect. We hypothesize that the aspectual transitions required by some aspectual combinations play a role in the difficulty of providing an appropriate continuation for them. We tested 130 French-speaking children of 5;06 to 9;0. In general, the data are consistent with the idea that the ability of children to construe an appropriate continuation for a stimulus clause is a function of both the situational aspect of the clause and the grammatical aspect provided by the verbal morpheme. There is a significant tense×situational aspect interaction in the number of continuations that children are able to provide in answer to the stimuli. Contrary to our expectations, there is no significant tense×situational aspect in the number of appropriate continuations, this being perhaps due to the small number of continuations for each stimulus type, but there are trends in the expected direction, which further studies may be able to confirm.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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