Effets du niveau d’éducation des parents sur la productivité morphologique des enfants en français en début de scolarisation
Research shows that a mother’s educational level can influence the quality of the child’s language (e.g., Tamis-LeMonda, Shannon, Cabrera, et al. 2004). There is also a correlation between maternal education level and a three years old child’s skills with verb conjugation (Silvén, Ahtola and Niemi 2003). In this study, we tested morphological abilities of 109 children (58 girls and 51 boys), either in kindergarten or in first grade, and tested whether these abilities were correlated with parental education. Some participants were French speakers (L1), and others multilinguals (MUL), but all were educated in French. We used the Jeu de verbes procedure (Marquis, Royle, Gonnerman, et al. 2012), which includes verbs with past participles ending in /e/, /i/, /y/ or that are idiosyncratic (e.g. mort /mся/) and established a performance score for each child. We then correlated this score with the mother’s, the father’s, and the average parental education level. Results indicate a link between parental education and children’s performances on the morphological task.
Morphological productivity Parental education Verb conjugation in French French schooling