ABSTRACT
Learning to write involves much more than learning to express ideas in an alternative medium to speech. The aim of this chapter is to outline how learning to write changes the way children process information. French-speaking monolinguals and adults were asked to produce narrative and expository texts in both written and spoken modalities. The texts are analyzed in an attempt to ascertain to what extent the predictions proposed by the theory of preferred argument structure (PAS) (Du Bois, 1987; Du Bois, Kumpf, & Ashby, 2003) hold across modalities and text types. PAS provides a framework for understanding how grammar is shaped by the communicative pressure of spoken discourse. It also provides a set of grammatical and pragmatic constraints that allow for clear measures of discourse preferences in texts. The predictions spelled out by PAS have been shown to hold for spoken narrative texts in a wide variety of languages (Du Bois et al., 2003). This chapter will add to this body of literature by questioning the extent to which the constraints proposed by PAS hold for expository texts and for the written modality. We will show how growing into literacy and academic discourse requires that children go against the natural flow of information in spoken communication. Particular attention will be given to lexical noun phrases, their distribution, as well as their syntactic architecture. A second goal of this chapter is to contribute to a body of literature that argues that lexical noun phrases provide a valid diagnostic of developing syntactic abilities and of text construction across genres and modalities (cf., Ravid & Berman, 2009).
