“Les copains *dit au revoir”: On Subject–Verb Agreement in L2 French and Cross-Linguistic Influence

Abstract

This study focuses on the production of subject–verb (SV) agreement in number in L2 French and investigates the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in this particular morphosyntactic domain. CLI is a well-known phenomenon in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research but it has rarely been investigated systematically in relation to SV agreement in French. The participants of the study are 114 learners with Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish as L1. The source languages are all inflectional languages but they vary in terms of morphological richness in the verb paradigm, ranging from very poor (Swedish) to very rich (Italian). The participants performed an oral narrative task contrasting singular and plural contexts of SV agreement. Results indicate a significant difference between L1 groups in terms of correct SV agreement but they also show that the overall presence of rich verb morphology in the L1 does not, on its own, result in a more correct SV agreement. It is when comparing learners at two different proficiency levels that we observe differences in the rate of L2 development, which may be explained as an effect of CLI. Overall, results indicate a complex interplay of different factors, where the role of CLI must be further investigated in future studies in relation to L2 French.

On the Source of U-Shape Learning in Interlanguage Processing: A Pilot Study on the L2 Acquisition of Number Agreement in French by Jordanian Arabic Learners

“…If languages are different in the featural contents of the morpho-lexical items used and hence different 2 For more on Arabic, see Al-Gharaibeh (2019). 3 Finally, two additional operations apply in the derivation: (i) the EPP feature on T 0 triggers the DP subject into the Specifier of TP and the T 0 undergoes head movement into v 0 resulting into an affix hopping 4 Chomsky (1995) proposed that the valued vs. unvalued distinction of features associates with another distinction of interpretable vs. noninterpretable features. Interpretable features have semantic effects and non-interpretable ones need to get interpretable in the Agree-Move operation.…”

Does Japanese/German L1 Metrical and Tonal Structure Constrain the Acquisition of French L2 Morphology?

“…They were asked to tell a story based on 30 images projected on a computer screen one by one. This story, entitled Paul et Pauline font la fête 'Paul and Pauline are having a party', adapted from Ågren and Van De Weijer (2013), has been designed to account for the acquisition of number agreement in L2 French verbal morphology (Ågren et al 2021;Granget et al 2021).…”

“…The data recorded with the protocol mentioned above are gathered in a corpus designed to carry out research on cross-linguistic influences in the acquisition of Subject-Verb agreement in French L2. The narratives were produced by speakers with L1 having different degrees of morphological richness, e.g., Dutch, Italian, French, German, and Swedish (Ågren et al 2021;Granget et al 2021). A sub-corpus was constructed from the productions of 14 speakers with German (7 speakers) and Japanese (7 speakers) as a L1, which were divided into two subgroups according to their lexical level: one subgroup estimated at A level and another subgroup estimated at B level (Granget 2018).…”

L’acquisition de la morphologie verbale française par des apprenants néerlandophones à l’oral et à l’écrit

“…Puis, des études à partir d'autres langues germaniques ont vu le jour ; référons notamment à Granget (2005) pour la morphologie verbale écrite chez des apprenants germanophones, à Howard (2006) pour des productions orales chez des étudiants anglophones, à Housen, Kemps & Pierrard (2008) et Michot (2014Michot ( , 2015 pour l'acquisition de la morphologie verbale à l'oral par des apprenants néerlandophones. Des recherches plus récentes prennent également en compte l'influence de la L1 sur la mise en place du système morphologique en FL2 (Stabarin & Gerolimich 2014 ;Granget et al 2021 ;Ågren et al 2021). En revanche, rares sont les travaux en FL2 qui appréhendent simultanément la maîtrise à l'écrit et à l'oral du système morphologique français.…”