Children's appropriation of grammar and constructions through self-repairs and reformulations
Résumé
Children's language acquisition develops at the crossroads of the appropriation of the linguistic system and its use in dialogue. Analyzing children's reformulations and self-repairs can help us grasp the interesting moments when the interdependence of “language” and “speech” in interaction is visible. This presentation will focus on the quantitative and qualitative analyses of Madeleine and Théophile self-repairs between the ages of one year and a half and three. These analyses will be set in the framework of the two children's general cognitive and linguistic development, in particular the grammatical tools, and the discursive and linguistic resources at the children's disposal as they grow up. We will show how the adults' input seems to shape the children's ability to reformulate their verbal productions: a) Both children have totally different strategies which are closely linked to their parents' input. b) However they both develop a preference for self-repairs in the contexts where parents solicit the clarification of the reference or the speech act. The children also quickly learn how to anticipate these solicitations and will reformulate their own utterances in conformity with grammatical rules and pragmatic constraints showing that they have internalized the adult usage. We will also concentrate our analyses on the high correlation between the ability to reformulate their own utterances and the linguistic tools in terms of grammatical markers and constructions at the children's disposal. This study is an attempt to show the link between children's linguistic and discursive abilities acquired in the course of their interactions with their adult interlocutors. The construction process of grammatical tools and constructions takes place through collaboration between adults and children. Reformulations, “repairs” made in dialogue will help reduce the discrepancies between children's production and the input. The reformulations first made by adults are then productively made by the children themselves. Self repairs and reformulations would thus be the result of a “grammaticalization” process in children's language through internalization of adult grammar and constructions.