title: Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French.
abstract: This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent 'the boy(s) read(s)') where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Institut Pluridisciplinaire des Saints Pères, Université Paris Descartes, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris, France. thierry.nazzi@parisdescartes.fr
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nazzi
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Barrière
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Goyet
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kresh
authors.forename: Géraldine
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Legendre
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires