L'Asymétrie entre L'Acquisition des Clitiques Sujets/Objets chez les Enfants francophones et L'Optionalité dans la Grammaire Enfantine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of recent theoretical and methodological developments in the areas of French morphosyntax and child acquisition, the present dissertation reconsiders the asymmetry reported in previous studies of the acquisition of subject and object clitics in French-speaking children. Our reanalysis allows us to address two important questions in the domain of acquisition, namely optionality in the child’s grammar and the role of input in development. By means of an exhaustive analysis of child and adult production, our research illustrates that adults produce several subject/object asymmetries, and we propose that the asymmetry reported for children is attributable to properties of the target language and not to the acquisition process. Beyond these conclusions, our research reveals a significant asymmetry during the course of acquisition, namely that the subject clitic reaches the target grammar faster than the object clitic. This asymmetry, which we qualify as rhythmic, is caused by a prolonged optionality of the object clitic. However, our study shows that this optionality is not generalized. Until roughly 3 years of age, object and subject clitics show a parallel development in spontaneous speech: they are optional. After this period (around 3 years), their production reaches the levels observed in adults. In contrast, some studies in elicited production have shown that object clitics are still optional beyond 3 years. These contradictory results lead us to propose that there are two types of optionality: spontaneous and induced. We explore possible sources of these phenomena and propose that the status of pronouns as clitic elements plays a role in spontaneous optionality. As for the induced optionality, we propose that it is attributable to variation in the input and the child’s tendency to regularize it. Overall, our results allow us to redefine the asymmetry, to propose that optionality is a multifactorial phenomenon, and to illustrate the role of input in the optionality exhibited by French children for this domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".