Fast mapping between grammatical constructions and meaning: Two experiments in French children aged 3 to 4

A fundamental issue in language acquisition, especially from a usage-based perspective, is to explain how children are able to generalise from item-based knowledge to a more general pattern-based form of knowledge. Casenhiser and Goldberg (2005) demonstrated experimentally how children came to learn mappings between novel phrasal forms and novel meanings. They showed that children could learn meaning associated with a novel word order on the basis of a minimal input, even without the help of a stable morphological cue.The goal of the current work is to try to reproduce the experiment of Casenhiser and Goldberg in another language, i.e. French. Moreover, French has some notable differences from English. Especially, although it follows the same verb order as English, word order is not as constrained, changing the word order for emphasis and other pragmatic reason is not unusual. So changing word order may not provide a sufficient cue for children to learn new syntactic patterns (Kail and Charvillat, 1986) . The experiment reproduced Casenhiser and Goldberg's in two different settings. A new grammatical construction will be associated to an original meaning (apparition of an object). Children have only 16 examples to learn this new association between grammatical construction and meaning. The test procedure is a forced choice between new uses of the new test examples were not used during the training phase) and distracters.Two types of new constructions were tested: one wih a non-canonical word order (NNV), and one with a new preposition. The results showed that young French children aged 3 to 4 were able to reproduce the results obtained by English children, but only with the new preposition, not with the NNV structure.The results suggest that, although the same principle maybe involved in all language, cros-linguistic differences can exist