The influence of the token frequency on the generalization of construction schemas in French-speaking children with SLI

Constructivist approach (Goldberg, 1995 ; Tomasello, 2003) postulates that children build their linguistic system from their own linguistic experience. To be productive with their language, children have to generalize construction schemas to never heard items. Because children with SLI seem to show limited morphosyntactic creativity and variability, we hypothesize that they would have difficulties to generalize their construction schemas what would hinder their access to the most abstract level of their linguistic competence. Given this lack of productivity of construction schemas in children with SLI, they would produce more lexicalized forms than abstract form what would lead to a limitation of the linguistic competence. The aim of our study was to test if children with SLI had more difficulties than children with typical language development (TLD) to generalize a schema to new items. Given the role of the token frequency in the abstraction of construction schemas (cf. Bybee, 1995), we decided to create a task in which we manipulated this variable.