L’acquisition du langage: comparer pour généraliser

On the basis of a large set of studies on off-line sentence comprehension in children and adults conducted in various languages, the first part of the article examines the impact and limits of the main processing principles of the Competition Model: cue validity, cue competition, cue cost and canonicity. Special attention is devoted to a principle we have previously proposed - the Locality Processing Principle - to capture the fact that in these languages children leam to rely more on costless cues, i.e. local ones. Current research focusing on on-line sentence processing in highly inflected languages such as Greek, Morrocan Arabic and to a less extent French, highlight some new sequential and temporal constraints on cue perceptibility and cue assignability which determine the integration of linguistic cues in real time.