The Acquisition of French Un

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that, in English, the indefinite determiner “a” and the numeral “one” are interpreted differently by adult-speakers, and interestingly, by English-speaking children too, as early as 2 years of age. Specifically, when children are shown a plate with two strawberries and are asked, “Is there a strawberry on the plate?” and, “Is there one strawberry on the plate?”, 2-year-olds answer “Yes” for a strawberry but “No” for one strawberry (Barner, Chow, & Yang, 2009). This suggests that “a” receives an existential interpretation (compatible with sets of 2 objects), while “one” receives an exact interpretation (compatible with sets of only 1 object). This also suggests that, to acquire an exact meaning of “one”, English children’s input for “a” and “one” must somehow differ. Interestingly, some languages like French feature the same phonological representation (i.e., un) for both “a” and “one”, a fact which might make it more difficult for children to determine whether the word belongs to the scale of numerals, or is instead an indefinite article, which could in turn affect how the word is interpreted. In our first experiment, we tested 63 French-speaking children (M = 3.5y) to investigate how they interpret “un”. On one hand, the ambiguity of “un” could make it harder for children to decide whether “un” is exact or not and slow the acquisition of “un” as a numeral. On the other hand, “un” could be acquired as a homophone, with two different meanings. On this account, children could still present difficulties interpreting “un” but by disambiguating the context (e.g., by asking about other numerals in the same context), children could choose the appropriate interpretation. To test these accounts, we compared French-speaking children’s interpretation of “un” to that of English-speaking children’s interpretation of “a” and “one”. Also, we presented French children with a Truth-value judgment task and asked whether their interpretation of “un” differs based on whether surrounding items are numerals (e.g., “two”) or are non-exact quantifiers like “ some” and “all”. We found that English-speaking children interpreted “one” as compatible with only sets of 1 while “a” was compatible with sets of both 1 and 2 objects. In contrast, French-speaking children almost always accepted sets of 1 for “un”, but their responses for sets of 2 were more equivocal, with many children accepting sets of 2 as compatible with “un”. Also, French children’s interpretation of “un” did not differ based on the context, suggesting that “un” is not represented as an homophone. We conclude that the French morphological structure may pose a challenge to French children by creating a more equivocal context, which is reflected in their uncertain interpretations of “un”. In our second experiment, we asked whether the ambiguity of “un” could cause a delay in the acquisition of early number words. We tested a new cohort of 73 French-speaking children with the Give-a-Number task, in which participants have to create sets of different numerosity. Analyses are currently in progress to test this hypothesis.

Authors

• Elisabeth Marchand, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• David A Barner, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author