Noms et Verbes : catégorisation syntaxique des enfants de 18 mois

Syntactic cues such as grammatical words or argumental verb structure were proposed by Gleitman [Gle90] as a powerful help to solve the multiplicity of possible meanings, in addition to visual and socio-pragmatics cues. However, how could pre-verbal children acquire this syntactic knowledge ? And crucially, is this knowledge available when infants are acquiring their lexicon ? We tested the syntactic categorization of nouns and verbs by 18-month-old French-learning infants using a conditioned head-turning paradigm. Children were taught to recognize a word (ex : la balle). Children recognized the target word in syntactic congruent contexts (la balle est rouge et verte) while they did not in incongruent ones (je balle une petite pomme). Thus, by the age of 18 months French infants are sensitive to the syntactic contexts in which nouns and verbs occur.