The effects of narrative context on French verbal inflections: A developmental perspective

This experiment examines how narrative context affects French subjects' selection of past imperfective (imparfait) vs. perfective inflections with different predicate types. Adults and 10-year-old children were asked to inflect verbs presented in their written infinitive form in two conditions: (a) in isolated sentences; (b) embedded in the beginning, middle, or end of narratives. Regardless of conditions, the adults rarely used theimparfait with punctual resultative predicates. In both conditions, the frequency ofimparfait was high with durative predicates, particularly with aresultative ones, but it varied with position in the narratives, being highest at the beginning and lowest at the end. Although the children also used the imparfait frequently with durative predicates, they overgeneralized it to punctual resultative ones, regardless of conditions and of positions. These results show that adult uses of the imperfective/perfective distinction are determined by both predicate properties and grounding in narrative context. The children are less sensitive to some predicate properties than the adults and they do not differentiate imperfective/perfective aspect consistently as a function of discourse context.