Abstract
[Transitional Stages : Contribution to the Study of Child Language Acquisition]
Traditionally, three major periods of development were distinguished in the acquisition of early child language: the preverbal stage, the one-word stage and the multiple-word stage. Recently, Bloom (1973) and Dore e.a. (1976) described «transitional phenomena» which apparently have a bridging function from one major stage to the next. In a transitional stage, the development of sound and meaning is partly independent. The child first acquires some part of a major acquisition stage before mastering the other parts; subsequently the child integrates those parts in the whole. In the major periods of the one-word and the multiple-word stages, the children brings perfectly his knowledge of meaning into line with his knowledge of sounds. In this study, the transitional phenomena are analyzed; they were identified in data collected during the observation of 6 children ranging in age from 18 to 22 months at the initial session. They were observed once a week over a four-month period.