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The status of ‘canonical SVO sentences’ in French: a developmental study of the on-line processing of dislocated sentences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Agnès Charvillat  and
Michèle Kail
Agnès Charvillat*
Affiliation:
Université René Descartes
Michèle Kail
Affiliation:
Université René Descartes
*
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris, France
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Abstract

This on-line study investigates the processing of word order by 30 French children (6;6, 8;6, 10;6) and 10 adults. Its main objective is to show that the privileged status granted to ‘canonical SVO sentences’ is inadequate to account for the on-line processing of pronominal utterances in spoken French. Using a word monitoring task, we showed that word order (NVN vs NNV): (1) is a significant factor in sentences containing no clitic pronoun; (2) stops being significant when sentences contain either one or two clitic pronouns. These results suggest that processing complexity depends upon co-reference (‘linear’, ‘crossed’ or ‘embedding’) assignment constraints rather than upon word order per se. We conclude that, in French, word-order processing always interacts with acceptability considerations provided by cliticization.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , October 1991 , pp. 591 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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Footnotes

*

The experiment reported here is part of a doctoral dissertation submitted to René Descartes University by A. Charvillat. The authors would like to thank Jane Oakhill and Alan Garnham for their careful reading of an earlier version of this paper.

References

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