Grammatical and situational aspect in French: a developmental study

We study the ability of children to provide an appropriate continuation for a stimulus sentence, taking into account the joint demands of situational aspect and grammatical aspect. We hypothesize that the aspectual transitions required by some aspectual combinations play a role in the difficulty of providing an appropriate continuation for them. We tested 130 French-speaking children of 5;06 to 9;0. In general, the data are consistent with the idea that the ability of children to construe an appropriate continuation for a stimulus clause is a function of both the situational aspect of the clause and the grammatical aspect provided by the verbal morpheme. There is a significant tense×situational aspect interaction in the number of continuations that children are able to provide in answer to the stimuli. Contrary to our expectations, there is no significant tense×situational aspect in the number of appropriate continuations, this being perhaps due to the small number of continuations for each stimulus type, but there are trends in the expected direction, which further studies may be able to confirm.

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How L2 learners of French and English express modality using verbal means: A crosslinguistic and developmental study

IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching ◽

10.1515/iral-2017-0108 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 55 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Pascale Leclercq ◽

Amanda Edmonds

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Language Proficiency ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Short Film ◽

Developmental Study ◽

Second Language Proficiency ◽

L2 Learners ◽

French And English ◽

French Speaking ◽

English Speaking

AbstractThis study describes and analyzes how native and non-native speakers express modality using verbal means during oral retellings. Participants included native speakers of French and English, as well as English-speaking learners of French and French-speaking learners of English at three levels of language proficiency. All participants performed the same short film retelling, which was then transcribed and analyzed in terms of modalization. Results show that all groups use verbal modal means, although rates, meanings and types of modal forms used vary across the two languages, and especially as a function of second language proficiency.

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Moving on and off the timeline in narratives of personal experience written in three languages: A form-function developmental study

Linguistics ◽

10.1515/ling-2015-0033 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 53 (6) ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Judy R. Kupersmitt

Keyword(s):

Middle Childhood ◽

Personal Narratives ◽

Age Groups ◽

Point Of View ◽

Temporal Organization ◽

Developmental Study ◽

Tense And Aspect ◽

Grammatical Aspect ◽

Narrative Temporality ◽

Linguistic Means

AbstractThis paper explores the construal of temporality in personal narratives written in English, Spanish, and Hebrew, three languages that differ in their morphological marking of tense-aspect. Participants were native speakers of each language in four different age groups from middle childhood across adolescence into adulthood, so taking into account developmental facets of narrative temporality in each language. Focus is on distribution of situations on and off the timeline of the story from the point of view of the linguistic configurations employed by narrators to express the temporal domains of tense and aspect in the three languages at both the intra-clausal and inter-clausal levels. Hebrew was found to differ from Spanish and English, both of which have more enriched system of grammaticized aspect, in the distribution of situations on and off the timeline both developmentally across age groups and in the linguistic means conflated in expression of temporality. The more impoverished system of grammatical aspect in Hebrew led narrators writing in Hebrew to prefer a more linear temporal organization than their counterparts in Spanish and English. The study distinguishes between shared versus language-particular patterns of narrative-embedded temporality from the point of view of linguistic forms and their temporal functions in the context of extended discourse. Results of the study shed light on the interrelations between local linguistic means and the discourse-embedded expression of temporality in narrative development.

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Letter to the Editor Concerning Skuk et al., “Parameter-Specific Morphing Reveals Contributions of Timbre and Fundamental Frequency Cues to the Perception of Voice Gender and Age in Cochlear Implant Users”

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/2020_jslhr-20-00563 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 63 (12) ◽

pp. 4325-4326 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hartmut Meister ◽

Katrin Fuersen ◽

Barbara Streicher ◽

Ruth Lang-Roth ◽

Martin Walger

Keyword(s):

Cochlear Implant ◽

Fundamental Frequency ◽

Stimulus Type ◽

Voice Perception ◽

Letter To The Editor ◽

Gender And Age ◽

General Influence

Purpose The purpose of this letter is to compare results by Skuk et al. (2020) with Meister et al. (2016) and to point to a potential general influence of stimulus type. Conclusion Our conclusion is that presenting sentences may give cochlear implant recipients the opportunity to use timbre cues for voice perception. This might not be the case when presenting brief and sparse stimuli such as consonant–vowel–consonant or single words, which were applied in the majority of studies.

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A Developmental Study of Intonation Recognition

Journal of Speech and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/jshr.1104.825 ◽

1968 ◽

Vol 11 (4) ◽

pp. 825-832 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Marilyn M. Corlew

Keyword(s):

Significant Interaction ◽

Multiple Choice ◽

Semantic Content ◽

First Grade ◽

Choice Test ◽

Developmental Study ◽

Multiple Choice Test ◽

The Third ◽

Matching Test ◽

Better Than

Two experiments investigated the information conveyed by intonation from speaker to listener. A multiple-choice test was devised to test the ability of 48 adults to recognize and label intonation when it was separated from all other meaning. Nine intonation contours whose labels were most agreed upon by adults were each matched with two English sentences (one with appropriate and one with inappropriate intonation and semantic content) to make a matching-test for children. The matching-test was tape-recorded and given to children in the first, third, and fifth grades (32 subjects in each grade). The first-grade children matched the intonations with significantly greater agreement than chance; but they agreed upon significantly fewer sentences than either the third or fifth graders. Some intonation contours were matched with significantly greater frequency than others. The performance of the girls was better than that of the boys on an impatient question and a simple command which indicates that there was a significant interaction between sex and intonation.

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Psychometrical Properties of a French Version of the General Self-Efficacy Short Scale (ASKU)

Swiss Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1024/1421-0185/a000233 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 79 (1) ◽

pp. 15-25

Author(s):

Jean Philippe Décieux ◽

Philipp Emanuel Sischka ◽

Anette Schumacher ◽

Helmut Willems

Keyword(s):

Self Efficacy ◽

Factor Model ◽

German Version ◽

French Version ◽

Context Variable ◽

Confirmatory Factor ◽

French Speaking ◽

German Speaking ◽

Valid Instrument ◽

General Self Efficacy

Abstract. General self-efficacy is a central personality trait often evaluated in surveys as context variable. It can be interpreted as a personal coping resource reflecting individual belief in one’s overall competence to perform across a variety of situations. The German-language Allgemeine-Selbstwirksamkeit-Kurzskala (ASKU) is a reliable and valid instrument to assess this disposition in the German-speaking countries based on a three-item equation. This study develops a French version of the ASKU and tests this French version for measurement invariance compared to the original ASKU. A reliable and valid French instrument would make it easy to collect data in the French-speaking countries and allow comparisons between the French and German results. Data were collected on a sample of 1,716 adolescents. Confirmatory factor analysis resulted in a good fit for a single-factor model of the data (in total, French, and German version). Additionally, construct validity was assessed by elucidating intercorrelations between the ASKU and different factors that should theoretically be related to ASKU. Furthermore, we confirmed configural and metric as well as scalar invariance between the different language versions, meaning that all forms of statistical comparison between the developed French version and the original German version are allowed.

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Self-Promoting and Modest Job Applicants in Different Cultures

Journal of Personnel Psychology ◽

10.1027/1866-5888/a000034 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 70-77 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Marianne Schmid Mast ◽

Denise Frauendorfer ◽

Laurence Popovic

Keyword(s):

Cultural Background ◽

Job Applicants ◽

Presentation Style ◽

Interview Situation ◽

French Speaking ◽

Different Cultures

The goal of this study was to investigate the influence of the recruiter’s cultural background on the evaluation of a job applicant’s presentation style (self-promoting or modest) in an interview situation. We expected that recruiters from cultures that value self-promotion (e.g., Canada) will be more inclined to hire self-promoting as compared to modest applicants and that recruiters from cultures that value modesty (e.g., Switzerland) will be less inclined to hire self-promoting applicants than recruiters from cultures that value self-promotion. We therefore investigated 44 native French speaking recruiters from Switzerland and 40 native French speaking recruiters from Canada who judged either a self-promoting or a modest videotaped applicant in terms of hireability. Results confirmed that Canadian recruiters were more inclined to hire self-promoting compared to modest applicants and that Canadian recruiters were more inclined than Swiss recruiters to hire self-promoting applicants. Also, we showed that self-promotion was related to a higher intention to hire because self-promoting applicants are perceived as being competent.

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