Dislocations as a Developmental Marker in French Language: A Preliminary Study

In a previous study, Parisse suggested that subject dislocations in French language (e.g. "la fille elle dort") could be considered as a marker of morphosyntactic development in children with normal language development. The present study aimed to develop this proposition and to confirm it with experimental data, more specifically the fact that this development would go through a four-step process. Our prediction was that children could produce forms that correspond to successive steps in the developmental process (for example, forms [1] and [2], or [2] and [3]), but not forms that were very different (for example, forms [1] and [4], or [2] and [4]). In order to test this hypothesis, a sentence repetition task was administrated to 27 children aged 4 to 5. The results confirm the presence of a developmental trend in the use of dislocation in spontaneous language. At age 4, dislocations were frequent (30%), and tended to respect the gender (stage 3 and 4). At age 5, dislocations were rare (stage 4). Previous stages (1 and 2) would be observed in younger children.