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Acquisition of adjectives in Quebec French as revealed by elicitation data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2010

PHAEDRA ROYLE  and
DANIEL VALOIS
PHAEDRA ROYLE*
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal Centre hospitalier universitaire Ste-Justine Centre for research on Language Mind and Brain
DANIEL VALOIS
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal Institut des Sciences Cognitives
*
Address for correspondence: Phaedra Royle, Université de Montréal, Faculté de médecine, École d'orthophonie et d'audiologie, C.P. 6128, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, (Québec), H3C 3J7, Canada e-mail: phaedra.royle@umontreal.ca
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Abstract

This study presents data from an elicitation study on French size and color adjectives in noun phrases (DPs), both early acquired structures. Thirty-two francophone children aged 3–5 years participated in the study. Adjectives were elicited using specially designed puzzles and spontaneous speech corpora. We observed that errors in French variable adjectives are produced in the early acquisition stages, especially in the context of feminine colour DPs. We propose that the source of difficulty for feminine variable adjectives is the retrieval of a lexicalized form that competes with the masculine adjective denoting the same concept.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , November 2010 , pp. 313 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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