Contrastive and additive relations in discourse

The aim of the study in object is to focus on cognitive and linguistic determinants of language acquisition in a cross-linguistic perspective that takes into account discourse factors in language use. The study is framed within a large comparative approach that combines many languages (and language families) and different types of speakers (children and adults) focusing on effects of diversity. The research questions are concerned with the relation between language and cognition with respect to contrastive and additive relations in discourse. The study considers two main research themes: 1) typological constraints across languages and uncovering their cognitive implications for native speakers; 2) processes of conceptualization and reconceptualization during L1/L2 acquisition. In addition, it simultaneously addresses two specific research questions in each domain: 1) the study of cross-linguistic differences in speakers’ output, as measured in production tasks aiming at studying the impact of language-specific properties on how speakers organize information in discourse; 2) the study of the cognitive underpinnings underlying these different outputs, as measured by a variety of psycholinguistic tools aiming at providing access to speakers’ internal representations (e.g. eye movements, categorization, memory), mainly in relation to productions elicited in controlled situations. Finally, the work examines these questions in two types of data bases for which some corpora are already available or in progress and others will be collected in new experimental situations and in new languages: 1) native speakers of different languages and 2) different types of learners, including children acquiring their first language, bilingual children acquiring two languages simultaneously, adults acquiring a second language, and balanced bilingual adults