Christelle Maillart

Christophe Parisse

Jodi Tommerdahl

F-LARSP 1.0: An Adaptation of the LARSP Language Profile for French

Keywords: LARSP, morphosyntax, language acquisition, SLI, French

) is a linguistic profile commonly used by researchers and clinicians to carry out detailed analyses of the grammar and morphology of children's spontaneous language samples. This paper discusses the methods used to adapt the profile from English to French using a large corpus of child language in order to accurately assign morphosyntactic structures to age-based stages.

Introduction

The LARSP (Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure) [START_REF] Crystal | The grammatical analysis of language disability[END_REF]) is a linguistic profile commonly used by researchers and clinicians to carry out a "comprehensive and consistent linguistic analysis" [START_REF] Ball | Grammatical analysis of developmental language disorders: A study of the morphosyntax of children with specific language disorders, with hearing impairment and with Down's syndrome[END_REF]; more specifically a detailed guide for analysis of the grammar and morphology of English-speaking children's spontaneous language samples. The profile was developed in a manner that allows the user to clearly see the child's grammatical strengths and weaknesses in relation to their chronological age. This is made possible by the notion that the order in which syntactic structures are acquired is relatively stable, at least until the age of about 5 [START_REF] Brown | A first language: the early stages[END_REF]). Correlation of a child's morphosyntactic production to their age provides the therapist with vital information regarding an array of areas including the possible presence of language impairment [START_REF] Gavin | Differentiating specific language impairment from normal language development using grammatical analysis[END_REF], appropriate remediation planning (McCartney 1993, p. 226), and a tool for measuring treatment efficacy [START_REF] Joffe | The persisting communicative difficulties of 'remediated' language-impaired children[END_REF]. The profile is therefore especially useful for children who are suspected of or who have been diagnosed with having forms of language difficulties such as Specific Language Impairment (SLI) where morphology and syntax are commonly affected [START_REF] Oetting | Morphosyntax in Child Language Disorders[END_REF].

French-speaking speech-therapists don't frequently use spontaneous language to assess the morphosyntactic level of their young patients. Two main explanations could be proposed for the reason behind this: 1) the absence of developmental norms to describe different levels of morphosyntactic acquisition; 2) the lack of validated analysis tools in French. In other words, French clinicians may well be aware of the potential weaknesses of using spontaneous samples in clinical decisions. Francophone clinicians are therefore reliant on standardized assessment tools.

It would therefore be useful to create a tool which would show developmental norms, provide a clear linguistic analysis, and that is also easy to use. Three major tools that could fulfill these requirement have been developed, mainly for English, for the purpose of evaluating grammatical development in natural language production: LARSP [START_REF] Crystal | The grammatical analysis of language disability[END_REF], IPSyn [START_REF] Scarborough | Index of Productive Syntax[END_REF], and DSS [START_REF] Lee | Developmental Sentence Analysis[END_REF]. All three have strengths and weaknesses. The DSS is interesting in that it provides simple grammatical information that is easy to compute, but today, with the help of computer analysis (see below), it has become easier to compute complex information. In deciding between the LARSP and the DSS, we have chosen to use the tool providing the most detailed linguistic information in order to obtain the most precision and widest options regarding analysis. The strength of the LARSP when compared to the IPSyn was that the LARSP is organised in age-related stages, which is helpful for language evaluation. Overall, the LARSP appeared to have the most potential, but only if its computation could become automatised and accurate developmental norms for French-speaking children could be established.

The project was therefore approached with the following aims:

(1) to provide French speaking clinicians with the most useful version of the LARSP possible This primary goal can be broken down into five sub-goals:

(a) to omit all LARSP structures from the original English chart that do not exist in French and to add structures specific to French (b) to simplify the use of the tool through the development of a computerised system that can assign F-LARSP 1.0 categories to a language transcript (c) to verify the accuracy of that computerised system (d) to use the computerised system to link potential F-LARSP 1.0 structures to chronological age ranged which are accurate and based on a large corpus of child language (e) to finalise the placement of elements on the chart based on criteria similar to that used on the Dutch LARSP adaptation (Bol and Kuiken 1990) and the elements' ability to be identified by the computer programme A secondary goal of producing the F-LARSP 1.0 was to encourage researchers working in different languages to adapt the LARSP to further languages by providing a clear outline of how this process might take place.

Description of the LARSP chart in English

Carrying out a full LARSP consists of seven consecutive steps including (i) sampling, (ii) transcription, (iii) grammatical analysis, (iv) structure count, (v) pattern evaluation, (vi) statement of remedial goals, and (vii) statement of remedial procedures [START_REF] Crystal | The grammatical analysis of language disability[END_REF]). The authors suggest collecting a sample for approximately 30 minutes split between natural play and discussion of experiences outside of the immediate surroundings in order to record at least 50 utterances.

Areas at the top of the chart exist for recording information such as stimulus and response types, major and minor sentences, and problematic productions. The main body of the LARSP is described by its authors as having seven stages, each relating to a chronological age between 0;9 and 4;6+. The stages are linked to ages based on Brown's seminal work (1973) although the authors suggest that the ages be taken with caution [START_REF] Crystal | The grammatical analysis of language disability[END_REF].

Generally, stages I to IV correspond to the same number of either clause or phrase elements being used together. For example, at clause level III, we would mark an example of the child using the three-part SVO structure. Similarly, a single word utterance might be labeled as a noun or verb and marked at stage I.

Stage V represents the level of coordination and subordination while stages VI and VII look at errors, discourse structure and style.

A column labeled 'word' is also present on the chart which lists morphological inflections in their acquired order. The list is also based on Brown's work (1973) and the structures are said to be developed throughout stages II to IV. Each time a child uses a particular structure in a language sample, a tick is made by the name of the corresponding structure on the chart.

The completed chart is then available to the researcher or clinician to compare to patterns described in the LARSP's instructions and to plan any required remediation procedures.

Adaptation of LARSP to other languages

The utility of the LARSP, originally designed for Anglophone use, has led to its adaptation to several other languages. Those which have been published for an international audience include Welsh (Ball 1988), Dutch (Bol andKuiken 1990), Irish [START_REF] Hickey | ILARSP: a grammatical profile of Irish[END_REF]) and Persian [START_REF] Samadi | P-LARSP: A developmental language profile for Persian[END_REF]. Out of these four, only the Dutch version includes the guidelines of chronological age. This is due to the lack of information about normal syntactic development and/or the small sample size used in the adaptations of the three other versions. The Dutch version thereby presents a more useful LARSP chart presenting clear evidence-based criteria used to determine whether a given structure should be included on the chart, and if so, at which stage in the chart: a. the structure should be used by at least 50% of the population at one particular Stage; b.

the median of the frequency with which a structure is used should have a value of at least 1.0.

Each of the adaptations of the foreign language LARSPs takes into consideration the specific nature of the target language's morphosyntactic structure and omits, adapts and adds items in order to suit this nature. The Irish and Persian and Welsh LARSP have a similar arrangement on the page to the English LARSP as both keep the upper boxes of the categories Unanalysed/Problematic, Responses, Spontaneous and Reaction and list approximately the same number of structures on the overall chart. The Welsh version also expands upon the original LARSP by developing a separate chart for morphology and a third for word-initial consonant mutations which although phonological, are triggered by conditions of syntax and morphology.

In contrast to this, the Dutch version does away with most of these boxes and also greatly slims the number of structures. This slimming down is an attempt to limit the structures used to those that "play a relevant role in the language development of pre-schoolers" and which are also used regularly.

Description of French Morphosyntax

At the earliest stages of adapting the LARSP to another language, the researcher must consider the structure of the English language for which the original LARSP was designed and in turn compare that structure with that of the new target language. Although each language will have idiosyncrasies which may be useful to place on the LARSP, two major areas are at the heart of the LARSP and must be carefully considered for all adaptations. These are the order and composition of clause elements (subject, verb, object, complement and adverbial) and details of a language's morphological elements. Information about French morphosyntax is included in order to provide the framework of ideas that needed to be considered at the beginning of this adaptation.

French word order

The canonical word order of French, as in English, is SVO (subject -verb -object). There are some exceptions: the use of object clitics leads to SOV structure (e.g. il le mange / he eats it), relative clause tolerate VS order (e.g. VS -l'homme qu'aime Marie / the man that Marie loves but also OSV que Marie aime / that Marie loves) and the interrogative structure allows the VSO order (e.g. connais-tu ce garçon? / do you know this boy?). The canonical SVO order tend to be preserved in interrogative forms using a rising intonative pattern (e.g. La fille embrasse le garcon ? / The girl kisses the boy?) or the "est-ce que" locution (e.g. Est-ce que la fille embrasse le garçon ? / Does the girl kiss the boy?). Null subjects are not permitted (* neige / *snows), except for imperatives. This feature lays down use of impersonal subject (e.g. il neige / it snows or it is snowing) [START_REF] Kail | Cue validity, cue cost, and processing types in sentence comprehension in French and Spanish[END_REF].

As in English, all determiners are located before the noun: demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, negative, and possessive (e.g. cette table " "). In contrast to typical English usage, adjectives are placed after the noun they modify (e.g. Une table ronde "a round table ") with the exception of a small set (e.g. petit "small"). Some items have a syntactic function. They are known as free morphemes. This category is composed of auxiliaries, pronouns, prepositions and determiners. Most of them have a fixed position in the sentence (in the beginning of a prepositional phrase for a preposition, in preverbal position for auxiliaries or clitic pronouns).

French morphology

French is a moderately inflected language. Due to historical erosion of endings pronunciation, its morphology is characterised by an important homophony in the spoken language which is in turn reflected on the chart. Verbal forms with different inflections are pronounced in a similar way (e.g. je mange, tu manges, il mange, ils mangent). 94% of the verbal forms, all the first group verbs described above, are homophonous for a number of inflections (e.g. il chante/ ils chantent) [START_REF] Paradis | French verbal inflection revisited: constraints, repairs and floating consonants[END_REF]. In French, the gender/ number of many nouns/adjectives is made clear only by the determiner. When audible, these inflections are formed by a vocalic (e.g. cheval / chevaux ; boeuf/boeufs) or consonantic (e.g. petit / petite) morpho-phonological alternation [START_REF] Dubois | La grammaire structurale du français[END_REF]. The vocalic alternations are so infrequent that they tend to be lexicalised. The morpho-phonological alternation « consonant/Ø » is more frequently used to mark the number on the verb (e.g. part-partent ; dort -dormant). This alternation is used in many different morphological mechanisms (verbal/nominal/adjectival morphology; derivation, liaison e.g. un petit enfant vs. un petit garçon). Past events are expressed by different tenses depending on several factors. Finished events occurring in the past are expressed by the "passé composé' with the auxiliaries "avoir" (have) or "être" (be) plus the past participle (J'ai mangé puis je suis parti). Interrupted events occurring in the past are expressed by the "imparfait' with the stem of the verb plus the following endings (-ais, -ais, -ait, -ions,-iez , -aient, e.g. je mangeais lorqu'il est arrivé). Upcoming events are expressed by two frequent tenses: "futur simple" for future events and "futur proche" for very close future events. The formation of simple future is the same for the three different groups: the stem of the verb plus the following endings (-rai, -ras, -ra, -rons,-rez , -ront, e.g. je mangerai). The "futur proche" is formed from the addition of the semi-auxiliary « aller » and the infinitive form of the verb (e.g. je vais manger). This is reflected on the chart with the inclusion of the ModInf category (modal + infinitive).

The article system contains definite and indefinite forms. Articles precede the noun and agree with it in number and gender. The inflections of gender or number within pronouns and determiner classes are based on a vocalic alternation.

To repeat, the primary aim of this project is to produce a francophone adaptation of the original English LARSP. Further aims include the development of evidence-based age-related stages as well as a computerised system allowing the LARSP to be carried out automatically from a transcribed sample. This paper will now present the sequence of steps followed for the purpose of achieving these aims.

Methods

A series of six steps was taken in order to achieve the stated aims. Steps I and II were carried out to fulfill goal (a) of identifying appropriate structures for potential placement on the French chart.

Step I of F-LARSP 1.0 design involved evaluating structures present on the English language LARSP in regard to whether each was potentially appropriate for the F-LARSP. The only limitation placed on each target structure was whether the same form existed in the French language. Forms existing in English but not French were identified and omitted from the chart. Examples of this include structures such as the plural forms of nouns which are present in French writing but not audible in speech, the contraction n't from the Word column, the genitive and the contracted copular.

Step II involved the close analysis of several transcripts of child language in French, noting structures occurring which did not exist in the English version and adding them to a first draft of the F-LARSP. These steps were carried out in joint meetings of the three authors who are all bilingual in French and English, with two being native French speakers. New target structures specific to French were added. Examples of this include structures such as n&FEM indicating the feminine form of a noun such as la patineuse (the female ice skater), and dislo-G and dislo-D which represent dislocations (repetitions of noun phrases by a pronoun) to the left and right such as in the following sentences: The resulting product of steps I and II was a master list of morphosyntactic structures existing in any of the French child-language transcripts which had been identified by hand.

Step III consisted of software development by the author C. Parisse's that can accurately identify most of the identified morphosyntactic structures in a language sample. Transcriptions of the recordings were grammatically coded for part-of-speech using the software CLAN from the CHILDES project [START_REF] Macwhinney | The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk[END_REF]. This software is able to produce a part-of-speech syntactic analysis (Parisse and Le Normand, 2000). This analysis was used as a starting point to produce a computerised version of the F-LARSP, using a handmade software tool. While the automatic analysis correctly labeled most French parts of speech and target F-LARSP structures, a small number of features of French, such as dislocations, were impossible to code by machine. Features of level 6 and 7 from the English LARSP as well as some features of level 5 were not able to be recognised by the new program due to their variety and complexity of possible forms and were therefore not coded. Details of the software development and implementation will be made available in Parisse, Maillart and Tommerdahl (in press).

Step IV used the software developed in step III to analyse a large corpus of child language of children ranging in age from 1;6-4;0. The software identified and counted the number of productions of each structure for each transcription in the large corpus, thereby providing data for establishing production norms for each age.

The corpus

The ability of the F-LARSP 1.0 to accurately link a chronological age to a stage of morphosyntactic productions required a corpus of child language. The corpus used was created by Le [START_REF] Le Normand | A developmental exploration of language used to accompany symbolic play in young normal children (2-4-years-old)[END_REF][START_REF] Parisse | Une méthode pour évaluer la production du langage spontané chez l'enfant de 2 à 4 ans[END_REF]. Typically developing participants were recruited from homes and nurseries in Paris, France and its immediately surrounding areas. Participants included 312 typically developing children (142 girls and 170 boys) ranging in age from 24 to 48 months. Selection criteria included normal hearing measured by an auditory screening test, scoring in the normal range on an age-appropriate nonverbal cognitive test (Symbolic Play Test; [START_REF] Lowe | Manual for the Symbolic Play Yest, Experimental Edition[END_REF] and being a native speaker of French.

This transversal corpus contains 316 recordings of 20 minutes each, from the age of 2;0 to 4;0. For the needs of this project, additional recordings [START_REF] Vial | Adaptation française du LARSP[END_REF][START_REF] Dumez | Analyse des conditions de passation et d'application du LARSP en vue de son adaptation francophone[END_REF] were carried out of children aged 18 and 21 months.

The corpus was gathered using the following methods. Each child participated in a dyadic interaction with a familiar adult partner (parent or nursery teacher) either in the child's home, nursery or school. The child and adult were seated at a small table, and the same standardised set of 22 Fisher-Price toys (house, family members, dog, beds, chairs, tables, rocking horse, stroller, cars, staircase) was used with all children. Similar but slightly modified play material was used for the younger children. Materials were more recent and from the brand Playmobil® and some elements were changed to avoid choking hazards. Basic information about the corpus' data including the number of children at each age, their average number of utterances in their samples and their MLU is shown in table 1 below. Note that the mean length of utterance (MLU) was calculated according to the number of words per utterance. The MLU measurements of the children from the French corpus are nearly identical to reported MLU norms of typically developing children in English [START_REF] Brown | A first language: the early stages[END_REF][START_REF] Miller | Eliciting procedures for language[END_REF].

Insert table 1 about here

Step V checked the accuracy of the software's identification of all potential F-LARSP structures from the master list. These checks compared the software's identification of target structures to those carried out by hand. An error rate of approximately 5% was determined, mainly resulting from the software's lack of structure selection.

Step VI honed the master list of structures down to the next version of the F-LARSP using descriptive statistics from the children's corpus along with the application of the first criterion of Bol and Kuiken (1987) which states that a minimum of 50% of the population at a given age must use the structure to be considered as the age of acquisition. This in turn allowed for the placement of each structure at an appropriate stage, using an age-based distribution of stages. Any structure that was never reached by at least 50% of the children of any age was omitted from the developing F-LARSP chart at this stage. It was later decided that a small number of structures not meeting this criterion would be included on the chart. An explanation of these exceptions is provided at the beginning of the discussion section.

As a second part of this final step, some small changes were made to the working chart. Except for a few key items, the chart has been limited to include only structures which the software can identify automatically. In addition, a small number of additional structures that do not meet the Bol and Kuiken requirements, but are potentially clinically relevant, have been added to the chart. These are clearly labelled on the final chart presented in Table 2 as each structure on the chart is accompanied by the percentage of children who produced the structure at a given stage. A usable F-LARSP chart and complete statistics about children's production of LARSP structures will be made available at the web site www.modyco.fr/flarsp/.

Results

Insert table 2 about here (F-LARSP Chart)

Insert table 3 about here (key to abbreviations used on F-LARSP Chart) This chart represents the final result of the project. All structures appropriate to English and not French have been omitted and several new structures, relevant to French, such as the dislocations, have been added. This meets our first earlier-stated goal. Structures are divided into the four categories of "clause", "phrase", "word" and "other" with each being listed a single time, at the earliest age that over 50% of the children used the structure (apart from the few exceptional structures that never reach the 50% criterion). It is interesting to note the large number of morphosyntactic structures acquired by the age of 3 as this contrasts with the smaller number acquired from age 3;0 -4;0. However, this final year shown on the chart represents important leaps in syntactic complexity based on coordination and subordination.

New software was developed and tested for accuracy in its ability to identify the structures of the F-LARSP 1.0 in comparison to identification by hand of trained experts. Results around 95% accuracy were found to be acceptable considering that the software error tended towards non-identification of structures as opposed to overidentification of structures. This accurate usage of the software met our goals of designing a new morphosyntactic identifying software and verifying its accuracy.

The software, in turn, allowed us to carry out very simple descriptive statistics to determine during which age-range any given structure was produced by 50% or more of the children in that range. This allowed us to place all structures achieving 50% or more onto the chart in the appropriate range, thereby achieving our final goal.

The achievement of each of our five stated goals go a long ways towards satisfying the primary aim of creating the most useful LARSP adaptation possible for French-speaking clinicians. However, an additional decision was made to include a small number of structures on the F-LARSP 1.0 that did not fit the strict criteria of 1) usage by 50% of the children at a given age and 2) the ability to be identified by the computer program. In our attempt to make the F-LARSP as clinically relevant as possible, a small number of additions were made to the chart. The reasoning behind this final step of adding certain structures that did not meet Bol and Kuiken's criteria is discussed in the following discussion section.

Discussion

With results clearly displaying at what age-related stage particular structures become regular, it is relatively simple to assign chosen structures to the appropriate stage. However, a more difficult question to answer is the one that asks how many morphosyntactic structures need be included to provide the most valuable data for evaluating child language and particularly for noting indicators of language impairment. When a variety of options present themselves, it is better to include more or fewer structures on the completed F-LARSP chart? Regarding the number of items to be included, our analyses show that several structures, due to their rarity, never attain the level of 50%. This leads to the question of whether these structures are relevant enough to be included on the new chart. By pertinent categories we mean categories that are frequent enough to be of normative use. Rarely used categories are less useful in helping to identify children with language difficulties because their low production by either a typically developing child or one with language impairment is likely to be the norm and therefore not especially informative. It is impossible to know whether children use these rarer targets by random chance, as fixed forms, or because they master them. On the contrary, frequent categories are more useful for diagnostic and remediation purposes. If they are common and appear in the production of at least 50% of children, they are likely to be found even in children with language disorders (or at least a large percentage of these categories should be found). This is an argument for omitting structures that never attain 50%. This was the guideline followed in GRAMAT (Bol and Kuiken's Dutch adaptation of LARSP) where they kept only categories produced by at least 50% of the children. However, might the inclusion of rarer items on the F-LARSP be of help to the clinician when planning treatment and when examining the progress of an individual patient? The Dutch version is greatly pared down from the English LARSP but could it be that this leads to a loss of valuable data? One reason to omit all structures that don't reach the 50% threshold regards the time it has traditionally taken to complete a LARSP chart. This should mean that including fewer structures makes the administration of the LARSP quicker. However, as we have developed a program which makes analysing a transcript automatic in regard to finding F-LARSP structures, the time constraint becomes considerably less problematic although some clinicians may choose to carry out a hand check for very specific analyses. The automatic F-LARSP processing feature makes the pruning of all non frequent categories less necessary because infrequent categories do not make the evaluation process more time consuming. For this reason, it could be interesting to keep infrequent categories for the purpose of performing more fine grained evaluations of older children or children with unusual production patterns. Of course, categories that are not used at all tend to clutter the evaluation process so we have chosen a compromise. On the F-LARSP 1.0 we therefore decided to include items that never attain 50% but which have been used by a minimum of 30% of children at a certain stage as long as they are identifiable by the software.

With the major decisions made about which structures to include and at which stage to place each one, questions of form needed to be dealt with. The original LARSP has an elegant foundation where Stage 2 corresponds mainly to either two clause elements or two phrase elements together, Stage 3 corresponds mainly to three elements making up a unit, and a row of expansions connect the stages. However, our results now show what were Stage 2 clause elements in the original LARSP to be spread through Stages 2-4 in the French version or inversely old stage 3 and stage 4 are now placed in stage 1 or 2. This redistribution of stages makes elements such as expansion lines that link stages seem inappropriate. We did however, include expansions not for the sake of bridging two stages, but in order to show the development of a clause element beyond the single word. The overall format of these sections have been changed though to accommodate the structures that can be identified automatically.

Furthermore, we find that the elements of the original English version LARSP's stage V which focus on the development of coordination and subordination to be problematic. The developed software is unable to successfully identify elements from Stage V and higher, yet information regarding a child's ability to form complex sentences is vital. For this reason, stage V of the chart is being kept in a nearly identical form to that of the original version and will for the time being need to be carried out by hand. Stages higher than V have been omitted as they cannot be identified by the software and are arguably less informative than Stage V. Further work on developing software in this direction is planned.

Overall, the chart has in some ways changed greatly from the original. The English version of the chart has an elegance of numbered stages that match with the number of elements in each structure along with expansion lines which show movement from one stage to the next. This style has been lost in our decision to use age norms based on strict criteria and the analysis of a large corpus. What has been lost in one area though, is hopefully made up in the accuracy in mapping of the morphosyntactic structures to the appropriate age of French speakers. Another sizeable advantage is the automation of the process.

As indicated earlier, this version of the F-LARSP shown in this article is unlikely to be the only one. Future plans for the F-LARSP include using the tool in different settings and with a variety of groups including older children and those with language difficulties. We expect that this will provide invaluable feedback from a community of users. Versions using different criteria will then be developed and placed online to provide maximal access and to attempt to meet a variety of needs of different users. These will be accompanied by detailed instructions explaining the construction and use of the chart, how it can be carried out automatically if desired and how the information provided by the F-LARSP can be used in clinic. Codes are composed either of a single uppercase letter, or of an uppercase letter followed by a lowercase letter. These can be combined together, such as for example, SVO, which corresponds to S for subject, V for verb, and O for object. Some codes are made of more than one uppercase letter such NP for noun phrase, and some codes have signs (+, >) added for readability. All of the elements that make up the codes are listed and described below.

A

  ) Moi je suis contente. (Me, I am happy.) B) Elle est belle la jeunesse . (It is beautiful, youth.)

  this table", une table "a table", quelle table ? "which table ?", aucune table "no table", ma table "my table

Table 1

 1 Production information of the corpus reporting the children's age, number of children per age group, mean number of utterances and mean length of utterances with standard deviation

	Age in	18	21	24	27	30	33	36	39	42	45	48
	months
	# children of	10	13	41	31	37	36	40	34	34	33	32
	Mean utterances	87	117	73	83	94	110	113	130	118	117	109
	Mean length of utterances	1.3	1.5	1.5 (0.4)	2.1 (0.8)	2.5 (0.7)	3.2 (0.7)	3.4 (0.9)	3.5 (0.5)	3.7 (1.1)	4.0 (0.7)	4.0 (1.0)

Table 2

 2 The F-LARSP 1.0 Chart indicating morphosyntactic structures produced by children of specific age groups with percentages indicating the prevalence of children who used the structure at least one time in their spontaneous language sample

			Clause			Phrase		Word	Other
	Stade 1 (1;6-2;0)				DN	ProO		Aux	PP	Q	Loc
					62%	70%		54%	62%	85%	100%
					ProP	NN		Present		Voc
					69%	30%		69%		100%
	Stade 2 (2;0-2;6)	AX	SV	VC	AuxPP	ModInf	PrN	Inf	Mod	ExpA	ExpO
		81%	90%	76%	71%	52%	55%	87%	68%	55%	58%
		VO	SVA		Cop	NegV	NegOther		ExpV
		68%	77%		78%	74%	58%			71%
	Stade 3 (2;6-3;0)	SVO	VCA	VOA	SO	NA	Others DAdjN		ExpS	ExpC
		81%	53%	39%	61%	61%	64%	83%		83%	53%
		Dislo-G Dislo-D		cX	PrDN	ProPro	Conj
		68%	83%		61%	94%	69%	83%
					RelPro	PrDAdjN
					56%	31%
	Stade 4 (3;0-3;6)	SVC	SVOA	VV	xCx
		53%	63%	32%	30%
	Stade 5 (3;6-4;0)	SVOC	Coord 1 1+	A + A	PrNN or PrAdjN
		31%			55%	38%
		S O C A	Subord 1 1+

Table 3

 3 Key to abbreviations used in the F-LARSP 1.0

	Note:	Codes for F-LARSP 1.0 table

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank Cécile Vial and Mélanie Dumez for the precious help for the collection and the transcription of the data about 18 and 21 month-old children. We also thank Marie-Thérèse Le Normand for allowing us to use her invaluable corpus of child language.


Christophe Parisse

Christelle Maillart

Jodi Tommerdahl

F-LARSP: A Computerized Tool for Measuring Morphosyntactic Abilities in French

Introduction

The version of LARSP which has been adapted for use for French-speaking children has followed the lead of [START_REF] Bol | Grammatical analysis of developmental language disorders: A study of the morphosyntax of children with specific language disorders, with hearing impairment and with Down's syndrome[END_REF] for Dutch in accurately linking stages of language development with chronological ages. Their approach used two criteria for determining whether a given structure should be included on the chart, and if so, at which stage: the structure should be used by at least 50% of the population at a particular stage; and the median of the frequency with which a structure is used should have a value of at least 1.0. For the French adaptation (F-LARSP), a large corpus of child language in French was analysed to determine at what stage structures should be placed on the new chart and how many of these structures should be included. Further details of the adaptation can be found in Maillart, Parisse & Tommerdahl. (in press). In the present chapter, we focus on the design and implementation of a computerized system for accurately carrying out F-LARSP much more quickly than is possible with current manual methods.

Description of French Morphosyntax

French basic word order

The canonical word order of French is SVO (subjectverbobject), but exceptions occur. The use of object clitics leads to SOV structure (e.g. il le mange 'he eats it'); the relative clause tolerates VS order (e.g. VS -l'homme qu'aime Marie 'the man that Marie loves' -but also OSV que Marie aime 'that Marie loves'); and the interrogative structure allows VSO order (e.g. connais-tu ce garçon? 'do you know this boy?'). However, in oral French, the canonical SVO order tends to be preserved in interrogative forms using a rising pattern of intonation (e.g. La fille embrasse le garcon ? 'The girl kisses the boy?') or the est-ce que locution (e.g. Est-ce que la fille embrasse le garçon? 'Does the girl kiss the boy?'). Null subjects are not permitted (* neige 'snows'), except for imperatives; an impersonal subject is required (e.g. il neige 'it snows' or 'it is snowing') [START_REF] Kail | Cue validity, cue cost, and processing types in sentence comprehension in French and Spanish[END_REF].

Determiners are located before the noun and have different forms including the demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, negative, and possessive (e.g. cette table ' with the exception of a small set (e.g. petit 'small'), which are placed after the determiners and before the noun.

French morphology

French is a moderately inflected language. Due to historical erosion of endings, its morphology is characterized by significant homophony in the spoken language. Verbal forms with different inflections are pronounced in a similar way (e.g. je mange, tu manges, il mange, ils mangent 'I/you/he/they eat'). 94% of the verbal forms are homophonous for several inflections (e.g. il chante/ ils chantent 'he/they sing') [START_REF] Paradis | French verbal inflection revisited: constraints, repairs and floating consonants[END_REF]. In French, the gender/ number of many nouns/adjectives is made clear only by the determiner. When audible, these inflections are formed by a vocalic (e.g. cheval / chevaux 'horse/horses') or consonantal (e.g. petit / petite 'little' masculine vs feminine) morphophonological alternation [START_REF] Dubois | La grammaire structurale du français[END_REF]. The vocalic alternations are so infrequent that they tend to be lexicalized. The morphophonological alternation « consonant/Ø » is more frequently used to mark the number of the verb (e.g. part -partent ; dort -dormant). This alternation is used in many different morphological mechanisms, such as verbal, nominal, and adjectival morphology, derivation, and liaison (e.g. un petit enfant 'a little child' where the t of petit is pronounced, vs. un petit garçon 'a little boy', where it is not).

The article system contains definite and indefinite forms. An article precedes the noun and agrees with it in number and gender. The inflections of number or gender within pronouns and determiner classes are based on a vocalic alternation. Lexical adverbs are often formed from their adjectival form plus the addition of -ment (e.g. calme-ment 'calmly').

Past events are expressed by different tenses depending on several factors. Finished events occurring in the past are expressed by the 'passé composé' with the auxiliaries avoir ('have') or être ('be') plus the past participle (e.g. J'ai mangé puis je suis parti 'I ate then I left'). Interrupted events occurring in the past are expressed by the 'imparfait' with the stem of the verb plus the endings -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez , -aient (e.g. je mangeais lorqu'il est arrivé 'I ate when he arrived'). Upcoming events are expressed by two frequent tenses: 'futur simple' for future events and 'futur périphrastique' for very close future events. The formation of simple future is the same for the three different groups: the stem of the verb plus the endings -rai, -ras, -ra, -rons,-rez ,ront (e.g. je mangerai 'I will eat'). The 'futur périphrastique' is formed from the addition of the semi-auxiliary aller and the infinitive form of the verb (e.g. je vais manger 'I'm going to eat').

Complex verb constructions, auxiliaries followed by a past participle, and modals including aller ('to go') followed by an infinitive are very productive and frequently used to express aspect and mode.

From E-LARSP to F-LARSP

The adaptation of the English language LARSP (E-LARSP) to F-LARSP was made in six steps:

Step 1

The two first steps were carried out in joint meetings of the three authors, who are all bilingual in French and English, with two being native French speakers. Target structures existing in English but not French were identified and omitted from the developing F-LARSP chart. This included structures such as the plural forms of nouns which are present in French writing but not audible in speech, the contraction n't from the Word column, the genitive, and the contracted copula.

Step 2

New target structures specific to French were identified as potential items to be added to the chart. Examples include structures containing lexical morphology such as n&FEM indicating the feminine form of a noun such as la patineuse (the female ice skater), and dislo-G and dislo-D which represent dislocations (repetitions of noun phrases by a pronoun) to the left and right, as in the following sentences:

Moi je suis contente.

Elle est belle la jeunesse.

Dislocations are frequent in oral language [START_REF] Blasco-Dulbecco | Les dislocations en français comtemporain[END_REF], even in the speech of young children (Parisse, 2008), and are likely to represent an important step in language development.

Step 3

Software identifying the potential morphosyntactic targets of the F-LARSP was developed by the first author.

Automatic coding of the F-LARSP

F-LARSP automatic processing is itself a three-phase process: (a) part-of-speech tagging, (b) extraction of grammatical forms, and (c) statistical analysis and creation of an editable chart.

The final user can intervene between phase (b) and phase (c) to check the accuracy of the extraction of grammatical forms and correct the results from the automatic process. F-LARSP, including charts, statistics and software, is available at <www.modyco.fr/flarsp/>. The present 1.0 version is partly based on the CLAN software from the CHILDES project [START_REF] Macwhinney | The CHILDES project : tools for analyzing talk[END_REF], and on Windows-based separate applications for phase (b) and phase (c). Future versions will be available for Apple Mac OS and other systems, and will integrate all phases into a single piece of software.

Phase (a). Transcriptions of the recordings were grammatically coded for part of speech using CLAN. This software is able to produce a part-of-speech syntactic analysis (Parisse & Le Normand, 2000). It is based on two CLAN commands, MOR and POST. MOR provides all possible parts of speech for a given word out of context, as shown in example (1) below. The whole dictionary used in the MOR command was created by the first author (see <childes.psy.cmu.edu/mortags/>). Examples (1) and (2) below provide an example of an utterance and all the possible tags that its words can have in French. Elements analyzed by MOR are represented by a main grammatical category followed by a '|', the base of the word (infinitive for a verb, masculine singular for a noun) and, whenever it is necessary, affixes separated by '-' for regular morphology and '&' for irregular morphology (see [START_REF] Macwhinney | The CHILDES project : tools for analyzing talk[END_REF]. The symbol '^' codes the ambiguity between two categories.

(1) *CHI: je crois qu' ils sont passés là+bas .

[= I think that they went (have gone) there]

(2) %mor: pro:subj|je&1S v|croire pro:rel|qu'^pro:int|qu'^prep|que^conj|qu'^adv|que^adv:int|qu' pro:subj|ils&MASC v:exist|être^v:aux|être n|passé^adj|passé^v|passer-PP adv:place|là+bas .

In (2), two words are ambiguous. One is qu' ('that'), which can have a variety of functions, such as referential (e.g. relative pronoun (pro:rel)) and linking (e.g. as a conjunction).

The other is passés, which can be a noun ('the past'), an adjective ('passed'), or part of a verb construction (a past participle). There are many such ambiguities in French, and a specific information about language adaptations available.) An example of the result of POST is given in (3). In this example, the parser did a fully correct job, but the actual results can vary from 95% to 97% of correct tagging depending on the type of language analysed.

(3) %mor: pro:subj|je v|croire conj|qu' pro:subj|ils&MASC v:exist|être v|passer-PP adv:place|là+bas .

Phase (b).

The second tool is applied directly to the output of the first phase. A set of handcoded rewrite rules was designed and implemented with a tool compatible with the CHAT files format. Rewrite rules are applied first to the results from phase (a) and are recursively introduced until no further rule can be applied. An example of the final result is presented in (4).

The results are presented as a text representation of a n-ary tree. A sub-tree is represented between square brackets with a similar number, for example [4 @Cop … v|passer-PP 4], line 3 and 4 of example (4). The highest node is [1 … 1]. Elements between square brackets in a node are sub-trees. The other elements belong to the node, such as '@Cop' and 'v|passer-PP' above.

(4) %ctr:

[1 @SV [2 PROV [3 @PronP [4 pro:subj|je 4] 3] VB [3 iVB [4 v|croire 4] 3] 2] @Conj [2 conj|qu' 2] @ExpV_SVA [2 PROV [3 @PronP [4 pro:subj|ils&MASC 4] 3] VV [3 @AuxPP [4 @Cop [5 iCop [6 v:exist|être 6] 5] v|passer-PP 4] 3] SmpAdverbial [3 iSmpAdverbial [4 @Locatif [5 adv:place|là+bas 5] 4] 3] 2] . 1]
In example (4), many rewrite rules were used. It is easier to explain how they are applied by following the construction of a specific tree branch. In example (4), the copula v:exist|être, corresponding to the word est ('is'), is rewritten as 'iCop', which is one of the ways the copula can be produced in French (it is not a complex copula construction), and this in turn is analysed as a '@Cop', which is the generic name for copula constructions in the rewrite rule system. The '@' which is in front of the construction name means that this construction is to be counted in the final F-LARSP chart, whereas 'iCop' is not, because it is a transient category used only for technical purposes. In turn, the elements '@Cop' and 'v|passer-PP' are grouped together in a '@AuxPP' construction. The '@AuxPP', which will be stored in the F-LARSP chart, is in turn rewritten as a 'VV' which, preceded by a 'PROV' (subject personal pronoun) and a 'SmpAdverbial' (a simple adverbial), makes it a '@ExpV_SVA' (a subject + verb + adverbial construction that includes an expansion of the verb), which is part of the top level description of the utterance, which in our example is '@SV' (subject + verb) @Conj (conjunction) @ExpV_SVA.

The hand-coding approach of this tool has the advantage of offering good control of the identified structure, but is limited in the way that it can handle unusual constructions because handling complex constructions supposes the creation of a very large number of rules. This explains why the tool does not tend to produce incorrect F-LARSP elements, but is not successful in identifying all F-LARSP elements, and especially elements belonging to Stages IV and V. Success is much better for elements from Stage I to III. Nonetheless, after systematic work on all F-LARSP constructions, the tool produces up to 95% of the expected constructions.

To facilitate rule design, all computation done on isolated words is performed using a separate set of rules.

Some specific features of French, such as dislocations, were difficult to code by machine. Features of Stage VI and VII from E-LARSP as well as some features of Stage V were not able to be recognized by the new program due to their variety of possible forms and were therefore not coded. Some of these limitations could be minimized with further improvements in the coding procedure, which will hopefully appear on the F-LARSP website with versions higher than 1.0.

After the process carried out in phase (b), it is possible to edit the results by hand and provide a better final F-LARSP evaluation. The manual process is carried out directly in the intermediate result file from the F-LARSP tool, which contains all necessary information for this, such as the original transcription, the linking with external sound or video if this feature was present in the original file, and the results of the MOR+POST analysis. It is not necessary to correct the tree analysis, but only to suppress, add, or modify information in the tree analysis line that begins with an '@', as the tree information and precise format are not necessary for further processing. The '@' information corresponds to the F-LARSP information relevant to the LARSP analysis and is used during phase (c) (see below).

Phase (c).

The third tool is used on the output of the second phase, after manual edition where necessary. All tags generated by phase (b) (automatically or manually edited) that belong to a specific set are extracted and listed. Also, the number of words appropriate to the 'Word' column of the F-LARSP chart is measured. This set of elements is then organized and presented in a format that corresponds to the F-LARSP chart. The format available for the 1.0 version is Excel or OpenOffice worksheets, but PDF presentations could also be computed in the future.

Step 4

The software was evaluated using a large set of language transcriptions to identify and count potential target structures. This corpus of child language was created by Le [START_REF] Le Normand | A developmental exploration of language used to accompany symbolic play in young normal children (2-4-years-old)[END_REF]Parisse & Le Normand, 2006). Typically developing participants, all native speakers of French, were recruited from homes and nurseries in Paris and its immediately surrounding areas. This transversal corpus contains 316 recordings of 20 minutes each, from children ranging in age from 2;0 to 4;0. For the needs of this project, additional recordings (Vial, 2010;[START_REF] Dumez | Analyse des conditions de passation et d'application du LARSP en vue de son adaptation francophone[END_REF] were carried out of children aged 18 and 21 months.

The corpus was gathered using the following methods. Each child participated in a dyadic interaction with a familiar adult partner (parent or nursery teacher) either in the child's home, nursery, or school. The child and adult were seated at a small table, and the same standardized set of 22 Fisher-Price toys (house, family members, dog, beds, chairs, tables, rocking horse, stroller, cars, staircase) was used with all children. Similar but slightly modified play material was used for the younger children: the material was more recent and from the brand Playmobil®, and some elements were changed to avoid choking hazards. Basic information about the corpus data is shown in the first line of Table 1 below.

Step 5

Accuracy checks compared the software's identification of target structures to those carried out by hand. An error rate of approximately 5% was calculated, mainly consisting of the software's lack of labeling of a structure. When errors detected in Step 5 could be corrected by improving rules used in Step 3, an iterative process (going back to Steps 3, 4, and 5) was used to improve the coverage of F-LARSP features.

Step 6

Statistical analyses were performed on the children's corpus to evaluate the relevance and appropriate stage of all syntactically coded features according to the first standard used by Bol & Kuiken (i.e. the age that any given structure was used by at least 50% of the population). Results ). As we have developed a program which makes analysing a transcript automatic with regard to finding F-LARSP structures, the time constraint is considerably less problematic, although some clinicians may choose to carry out a hand check for very specific analyses. The automatic F-LARSP processing feature makes the pruning of all less frequent categories from the chart less necessary because infrequent categories do not make the evaluation process more time consuming. For this reason, the inclusion of lesser used structures may be of value in order to perform a more fine-grained analysis of older children or children with unusual production patterns. Of course, categories that are not used at all tend to clutter the evaluation process, so for F-LARSP 1.0 we have included items that never attain 50% but which have been used by a minimum of 30% of children at a certain stage. These categories are identified through the use of italics.

are presented in

Table 1 contains the results for all F-LARSP structures that were kept in the final chart and the results for all age ranges.

Insert Table 1 about here

Discussion

The main objectives of F-LARSP were (1) to provide speech therapists with precise developmental data, which had not previously been available, about the emergence of morphosyntactic structures in French and (2) to provide a complete and rapid assessment tool for analyzing morphosyntactic abilities in oral language. Previously, the coding required for LARSP was very time consuming to carry out by hand, limiting its use in clinical situations. A computerized tool was therefore developed from CLAN transcriptions to reduce the effort involved in carrying out data analyses. This tool allowed us to process a large French-speaking corpus of 329 children aged 18 to 60 months and also to provide precise percentages of children producing structures that corresponded to a particular age level.

The completed F-LARSP chart presented in Table 2 contains, as a reference, the percentage of children producing the structure for the corresponding age level. A usable F-LARSP chart and complete statistics about children's production of LARSP structures will be made available at the web site <www.modyco.fr/flarsp/>.

Insert Table 2 about here (F-LARSP Chart)

One should note that the inclusion of a structure on F-LARSP says little about the number of times the average child uses that structure. A grammatical structure used by 50% or more of the children within an age group was included on the chart regardless of whether the average use was 1 or 30 occurrences. However, a structure greatly used by a few children and not used by most could not attain a place on the chart. Given this, it is possible that the information provided on this version of the chart is not ideal in its ability to identify individual differences or to suggest important clues about the character of certain language disorders. This problem may be purely theoretical, as work carried out with children with SLI shows that the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes is similar to typically developing children, with (for example) present tense being acquired before past tense and determiners being acquired before clitic pronouns, regardless of their phonological form [START_REF] Jakubowicz | Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition[END_REF].

However, even though the sequence of acquisition is identical, acquisition may still be much later; for example, the omission of articles in children with SLI corresponds to the pattern seen in younger normally developing children (Paradis, Crago, Genese & Rice, 2003). In future it will therefore be beneficial to analyse language samples with language impairments in order to verify if, when compared with typically developing children with the same MLU (mean length of utterance), a similar distribution of categories is found.

Finally, we are aware that adjustments and improvements remain to be made, particularly regarding more complex structures, which have not yet been computerized. At this stage, the software developed is unable to successfully identify elements at Stage V and higher, yet information regarding a child's ability to form complex sentences is vital. For this reason, Stage V of the chart, as well as the dislocations, are being retained in a nearly identical form to that of the original version, and will for the time being need to be carried out by hand. Similarly, Stages VI and VII have been omitted as they cannot yet be identified by the software, and in any case are arguably less informative than Stage V. Further work on developing software in this direction is planned.

As suggested above, the version of F-LARSP described in this chapter is unlikely to be the only one. Future plans for F-LARSP include using it in different settings and with a variety of groups including older children and those with different types of language difficulties, which we expect will provide invaluable feedback from a community of users. Versions using different criteria will then be developed and placed online to provide maximal access and to attempt to meet the needs of different users. These will be accompanied by detailed instructions explaining the construction and use of the chart, how it can be carried out automatically if desired, and how the information provided by F-LARSP can be used in clinical settings.

  CLAN command, POST (created by the first authorsee Parisse & Le Normand, 2000), uses the distributional properties of French to propose a best candidate out of the various options from MOR. (It can be used for other languages, and has been in one example successfully adapted to English by Brian MacWhinney. See <childes.psy.cmu.edu/mortags/> for further

  Parisse, C. (2008). Left-dislocated subjects: a construction typical of young French-speaking children? In P. Guijarro-Fuentes, P. Larrañaga, & J. Clibbens (eds), First language acquisition of morphology and syntax: perspectives across languages and learners (pp. 13-30). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Parisse, C. & Le Normand, M. T. (2000). Automatic disambiguation of morphosyntax in spoken language corpora. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 32, 468-481. Parisse, C. & Le Normand, M.T. (2006). Une méthode pour évaluer la production du langage spontané chez l'enfant de 2 à 4 ans,Glossa, 97, 10-30. Vial, C. (2010). Adaptation française du LARSP. Aspects linguistiques. Mémoire inédit présenté en vue de l'obtention du titre de master en logopédie, Université de Liège.

  this table', une table 'a table', quelle table? 'which table?', aucune table 'no table', ma table 'my table'). In contrast, adjectives are placed after the noun they modify (e.g. une table ronde 'a round table')

Table 1 .

 1 The earliest age at which a structure attains a 50% level or higher is the age that the structure was placed on the F-LARSP chart. Except for a few key items, we have limited the chart to include only structures which the software can identify automatically.With these results clearly displaying the age-related stage at which particular structures become regular, it is a relatively simple matter to assign examples to the appropriate stage. This motivated the occasional use in our chart of categories produced by at least 30% of the children (see further,Maillart, Parisse & Tommerdahl, in press

Table 1 -

 1 Percentages of children producing LARSP target structures

				Age	1;6 1;9 2;0 2;3 2;6 2;9 3;0 3;3 3;6 3;9 4;0
				No. of children	10 13 41 31 37 36 40 34 34 33 32
				Mean utterances	87 117 73 83 94 110 113 130 117 114 109
				Mean words	114 181 118 185 236 364 397 457 464 475 453
	New	Old	Section
	stage	stage	type	Category \MLU	1.23 1.38 1.50 2.13 2.44 3.22 3.41 3.51 3.72 3.98 4.01

Table 2 -

 2 F-LARSP Chart

F-

LARSP adapted from original by Maillart, Parisse and Tommerdahl (in press)

		Clause	Phrase	Word	Other
	Stage 1		DN ProO ProP	Aux PP	Q Loc Voc
	(1;6-2;0)		62% 70% 69%	Present	85% 100% 100%
			NN	54% 62%
			30%	69%
	Stage 2	AX SV VC VO SVA	AuxPP ModInf PrN	Inf Mod	Exp: A O V
	(2;0-2;6)	81% 90% 76% 68%	Cop	87% 68%	55% 58% 71%
		77%	71% 52% 55% 78%
			NegV Neg O
			74% 58%
	Stage 3	SVO VCA VOA	SO NA Others		Exp: S C
	(2;6-3;0)	81% 53% 39%	DAdjN cX		83% 53%
			61% 61% 64% 83%
		Dislo-G Dislo-D	61%
		67,7% 83%	PrDN ProPro Conj
			RelPro
			94% 69% 83% 56%
			PrDAN
			31%
	Stage 4	SVC SVOA VV	xCx
	(3;0-3;6)	53% 63% 32%	30%
	Stage 5	SVOC	Adjunct + adjunct
	(3;6-4;0)	31%	55%
			Others (3elts)
		Coord 1 1+	38%
		Subord 1 1+	NP-Pr-NP
			38%
		S O C A

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank Cécile Vial and Mélanie Dumez for their precious help for the collection and the transcription of the data from 18-and 21-month-old children.