DEVELOPMENTAL-STUDY OF THE ONLINE PROCESSING OF TRANSITIVITY CUES IN FRENCH AND SPANISH

Two on-line experiments explore the priming effect of verbs lexical feature (transitivity vs intransitivity) and of object clitic pronouns as a function of language (French and Spanish) and age (6;6, 8;6, 10;6, adults). Using a target-monitoring task, we have shown that parsing strategies were age- and language-dependent, and stressed the necessity for studies of parsing strategies to focus on the distinction between general and specific aspects of on-line language processing. In the first experiment, we have shown that verbal transitivity is a crucial cue to on-line sentence processing among adults; yet, Spanish children's results suggest that adult-like processing may be delayed by the existence of specific morphosyntactic devices involved in transitivity. The results of the second experiment reveal cross-linguistic contrast in the way a given cue (the object clitic PRO) is used by adult speakers of different languages; the fact that Spanish children's parsing options, contrary to French children's ones, do not conform with adults' is interpreted in terms of developmental impact of structural specificities.