How do French children acquire the grammatical system of their native language so easily? Many hypotheses have been put forward and experimentally tested to solve this mystery. Generative theories argue that grammar is a universal and innate ability ready to be instantiated after birth. Within this framework, grammatical development is seen as a process whereby universal grammar gradually settles into the language-specific structures of the linguistic input that children receive in the first years of life. In the last decades however, many researchers of child language development have suggested other explanations. Current functional-cognitive research (cf. Langacker, 1988, 2000; Bybee, 1995, 2002; Elman et al., 1996; Tomasello, 2003; Diessel, 2004), proposes a usage-based approach to first language acquisition, where grammar is shaped by usage, and linguistic constructions are taken from parental input and gradually generalised by the child. Usage-based theories thus consider grammatical development as a dynamic process which emerges and evolves, in parallel with cognitive and psychological development, through the use of symbolic patterns which consolidate into grammatical constructions.

The Paris corpus was financed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, in the context of two research programmes entitled ‘Acquisition du Langage et Grammaticalisation’ (2005–2008, http://anr-leonard.ens-lsh.fr/) and ‘Communication Langagière chez le Jeune Enfant’ (CoLaJE, 2009–2012, http://colaje.risc.cnrs.fr). The aim of the two programmes was to collect new French data and add five new longitudinal corpora to the international database of the CHILDES project (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/, MacWhinney, 2000), improve researchers’ transcription and coding systems to enable them to study the emergence and development of grammatical patterns used by children between age one and seven, and compare child and adult speech. The programmes brought together specialists from various fields of language acquisition in order to study language development in the same longitudinal corpus from a multimodal and interdisciplinary perspective. The analyses aimed to find regularities in acquisition for each child and across the children.

La prosodie, qui fait l'objet d'une acquisition précoce chez le jeune enfant, pourrait contenir des indices (pauses, intonation, accentuation) susceptibles de faciliter la mise en place des premières combinaisons de deux mots et des premières relations syntaxiques. Nous proposons d'examiner les caractéristiques prosodiques des productions de Madeleine, entre 11 et 23 mois. L'analyse acoustique de 550 productions fait apparaître que les premiers mots apparaissent vers 12 mois de façon concomitante à la réalisation accrue de proto-mots bisyllabiques, produits avec des contours montants et montants-descendants, dont la forme temporelle se rapproche de la forme adulte. Les combinaisons de mots émergent ensuite, à partir de 18 mois, caractérisées par un contour d'intonation unique et modulé qui permet d'exprimer leurs liens de dépendance.

Little is known about what guides children in their acquisition of grammatical categories. This paper investigates how semantic knowledge could be involved in discovering these categories, thus confronting two competing hypotheses: are semantic categories innate, or are they developed in a piecemeal fashion? We tested for regular associations between basic semantic dimensions and the development of the founding categories of noun and verb. Six perceptually based semantic dimensions (Parisse and Poulain, 2010), shared by nouns and verbs but potentially distinctive, are coded in the productions of three children aged 1;06 to 2;06. Our results suggest that semantic dimensions do not offer an entry into the early differentiation of noun and verb categories.

Children's awareness of grammar can be traced in the way they use and particularly misuse morphology and constructions in what Clark (2001) calls ‘emergent categories’. We focus our longitudinal study on a French speaking child's use of possession markers (Anaé, Paris Corpus), and her creative nonstandard productions (la poupée de moi for ma poupée/my doll). We provide a detailed analysis of the ways in which she moves between a global strategy thanks to which she locates, identifies and uses whole blocks or constructions without analyzing them, and a more analytic strategy that parallels her progressive mastery of the semantic and syntactic complexity of grammatical morphemes.

Cette étude adopte une approche à la fois fonctionnaliste et usage-based de l'acquisition du langage pour rendre compte des formes non conventionnelles de référence à soi en position sujet chez une enfant francophone, Anaé, entre 1;05 et 3;00. D'une part, nos analyses quantitatives et qualitatives révèlent la présence, après 2 ans, d'un paradigme de verbes à valeur modale pour lesquels la référence à soi en position sujet peut être implicite. Pour ces verbes, comme pour tous les verbes avant 2 ans, un sujet grammatical est essentiellement produit dans des situations où l'enfant exprime un positionnement intersubjectif. D'autre part, la production de formes non conventionnelles met en évidence la création d'associations entre des formes et des contextes interactionnels spécifiques. L'analyse du langage adressé à l'enfant suggère que ces associations trouvent notamment leur origine dans le langage de la mère.

In this paper, our aim is to analyze the relationship between the development of verbal forms and verbal functions. We examine all verbal forms produced longitudinally by two French children in terms of their morphosyntactic marking of tense, aspect, mood and situation type, and compare them to their contextually interpreted meanings. We introduce the main issues relevant to the unfolding of the verbal temporal system in children's data. Our data consists in two longitudinal corpora of French speaking children aged 1;06 to 3;01. The paper focuses on: 1) the relationship between form and function within the verbal system in the earlier stage of development; 2) the children's ability to mark a displacement between speech time and event time.

This article tests Diessel's ‘integration’ path of development of adverbial clauses (cf. Diessel, 2004), with special focus on the acquisition of ‘causal’ adverbial clauses, in the context of the overall development of grammatical/semantic complexification in a French child's longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech (Madeleine, Paris Corpus) from 10 months to 4;01 years old. Three main patterns are retrieved in the child's uses of parce que constructions in interactional contexts. Linguistic analysis of these constructions reveals a dynamic pattern of syntactic expansion, integration and diversification, here called the concertina effect, which may provide an insight into the cognitive and pragmatic motives for syntax development in first language acquisition of French.