Communiquer sur des arrangementsspatiaux familiers et inhabituels : la dépense linguistique économise le coût cognitif

摘要

In a referential communication task, four to nine years old children had to describe five spatial relations between usual objects in different situations occuring each one with two levels of familiarity : to Thread or String in (Enfiler dans) , to Thrust or Drive into (Enfoncer dans), to Roll or Coil around (Enrouler autour de), to Hang up or to Hook (Accrocher à), to Lean against (Appuyer contre). The length and accuracy of the descriptions increase with age but especially when the familiarity of the situation is great. The child is not « economic » with the control of the length of the productions but in such a way, avoid a more important cognitive processing. The speaker use a system of general and ambiguous words, and reserve contrastive and specific verbs to familiar situations rather than to unfamiliar. These results allow us to think that young speakers develops two types of prototypical concepts, very concrete ones relative to familiar contexts only and after relatively abstracts prototypes with other possibility of extension, before the development of more abstracts an analytic notions. Therefore, even when familiarity decrease, four years old children begin to understand very well each other using a « code » with very general terms.