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Updated: Aug 6, 2026
07:36
Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
Grammatical and situational aspect in French: a developmental study
Marie Labelle1, Lucie Godard, Catherine-Marie Longtin
1Université du Québec à Montréal, QC, Canada. labelle.marie@uqam.ca
Journal of Child Language
|July 12, 2002
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Child Language Acquisition
Background:
- Children's understanding of grammatical aspect and situational aspect is crucial for sentence completion.
- Aspectual transitions may influence the complexity of language processing in children.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how children aged 5 to 9 years complete sentences based on situational and grammatical aspect.
- To test the hypothesis that aspectual transitions impact the difficulty of appropriate sentence continuation.
Main Methods:
- 130 French-speaking children (aged 5;06 to 9;0) participated.
- Children were presented with stimulus sentences to elicit continuations.
- Analysis focused on the relationship between aspectual properties and children's responses.
Main Results:
- Children's ability to provide sentence continuations is influenced by both situational and grammatical aspect.
- A significant interaction between tense and situational aspect was found in the total number of continuations.
- No significant interaction was found for appropriate continuations, though trends were observed.
Conclusions:
- Children's sentence continuation abilities are modulated by aspectual features.
- Further research is needed to confirm the role of aspectual transitions in appropriate continuations.
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