Contributions maternelles et paternelles au développement des représentations symboliques et catégorielles des objets par les jeunes enfants

This paper presents current data about parental stimulations concerning symbolic representations and categorization in young children. Parental contributions are considered according to the age of the children, the linguistic context, and the sex of the involved parent. During the second year, event if maternal and paternal games toward toddlers are mostly similar, some differences emerge: fathers present stimulations, such as non conventional games, which destabilize children's knowledge. Between two and three years old, in more linguistic contexts, mothers' utterances are more responsive to the children's level of abstraction than fathers, in terms of distancing strategies. Between three and four years old, mothers still adapt more their discourse than fathers to the children's language, by using object categories which are known by the children. Parental object description are also quite different, as fathers point perceptive features (shape, color) while mothers talk about more encyclopaedic aspects (functions, general properties of the objects).