On native semantic roles - comparative study based on data from child language acquisition of English and French

This study explores statistically child language-acquisition using data extracted from large collections for acquisition in two languages - English and French. Comparison of the two collections reveals that the advancement in acquiring vocabulary displays very big differences when the children’s speech is classified by the parts of speech deployed, as these are formally defined in the two languages, despite there being no reasons to suppose that the two language groups of children should show significant differences in cognitive development. The hypothesis put forward is that there exist general classes of meaning-representation and the challenge is to obtain evidence corroborating this. A specific set of classes is proposed, derived according to their different contributing roles in the mental representation of the world, considered from the perspective of an “Actor in the environment” cognitive model. The identified parts of speech from the two languages are sorted into the proposed classes. It is shown statistically that when children’s speech is discriminated to these classes, the acquisition processes in the two languages are very alike. Examining the data, the use of these classes is evident from the onset of language production. Some particularities related to factors influencing the use of communicators, interjections and onomatopoeias in children’s speech are discussed in addition to the study’s overall findings.