This study investigates the combined effects of Age of Onset of Acquisition (AOA) and quality and quantity of input on the development of three grammatical structures in French. In a longitudinal and multiple case study including successive (L2) Swedish-French bilingual children (n = 3), simultaneous (2L1) Swedish-French bilingual children (n = 3) and monolingual French children (n = 3), we examine the development of finite verb forms, object pronouns and subject-verb agreement. A distinction is made between structures that are early/late in different modes of acquisition and less/more difficult. The operationalization of quantity and quality of input is based on individual input profiles. The results show that AOA affects the development of less difficult and early grammatical structures whereas AOA has no influence on more difficult structures that are acquired late. An effect of input is found in the 2L1 children, and in some of the L2 children. This effect is most clear with more difficult and late structures.

This article reports the results of a survey focusing on the educational context of second foreign languages (SFL) to which 147 Swedish secondary school leaders responded. The study aims to provide a picture of how SFLs like German, French and Spanish are organised in a representative selection of Swedish schools across the country. The results of the survey show that there are major differences between languages when it comes to the language offer and the number of pupils and teachers in the respective languages. Moreover, there are also important differences between schools, some of which can be related to educational, socioeconomic and regional aspects of the responding schools. A general conclusion of the survey is that conditions for SFLs currently vary across languages and across the country. One of the main challenges for the future seems to be to maintain a varying offer of languages in a majority of schools.

The acquisition of preverbal liaison (e.g. ils arrivent /ilzaʀiv/) in second language (L2) French has rarely been explored in detail in previous studies on obligatory liaison. In this study, we conducted an elicited imitation test in order to study the influence of proficiency level, modality (spoken or written), and verb frequency on the use of preverbal liaison among 42 Swedish learners of L2 French and 21 native speakers of French. The results indicate that L2 beginners had considerable difficulty with the production of preverbal liaison, while the most proficient L2 learners performed nearly as well as the native speakers. In addition, we observed that beginner learners, in contrast to the more proficient ones, performed better with written than spoken stimuli. Finally, we observed no impact of verb frequency on participant performance. Based on these results, we discuss the possible influence of input frequency (both type and token) on the production of preverbal liaison, and conclude that future studies need to address the input characteristics of the L2 classroom in more detail.

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The present study focuses on the characteristics of subject-verb agreement in number in spoken and written French, two morphological systems that are very different. In particular, we investigate the impact of frequency of forms and morphological patterns in the input on the acquisition of number agreement in monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children (n = 32). Our results demonstrate an almost perfect fit between the partial and heterogeneous nature of number agreement in the spoken input and the errors found in the children's spoken narratives. However, the influence of a highly systematic written number-agreement on the children's written narratives is weak, mainly due to the lack of phonological cues of number agreement in written French.