Title: Left-dislocated subjects: A construction typical of young French-speaking children?

Few constructions in child’s production can be considered originals and not mere copies (partial or complete) of adult input. These rare constructions are precious to child language studies because they may reveal a developmental process at work. One of them is children’s left-dislocated subjects. In French, when there is no lexical subject, the use of a subject pronoun is mandatory. When there is a lexical subject, two constructions are possible: one with the use of a personal pronoun and one without. Children tend to produce a lot of pronouns in the context of lexical subjects, which makes it a good candidate for being a specific feature of child language. This study used two corpora of spontaneous language production, one with children aged three to four and one with children aged two to four. The data were analyzed using Tomasello’s framework (usage-based theory of language acquisition). In this theory, children’s language competence differs from the adults ’ and develops with age. The first issue was to demonstrate the existence of this specific feature. Indeed, it appeared that children produced more left-dislocated subjects than adults and did not simply reproduce a feature of adults ’ oral language. The presence of a developmental effect in the children’s production was also strongly suggested by the results