Emergence of morphographical markers in written French: what children following a special education programme say about plurals

Abstract

Research conducted with average apprentice writers demonstrated that the main difficulty they are facing in the acquisition of written French is the acquisition of the morphology of the writing system, hence studies with slow writers show that morphological traces are late to emerge and often fail to meet the grammatical demands of French. This exploratory research conducted with slow mono- and multilingual learners attempts to identify the qualitative aspects of the emergence of morphological traces, which in the written French system are most often mute. The linguistic concept of the plural was therefore chosen not simply to observe the appearance of plural grammatical markers in productions, but also in order to stimulate apprentice writers to give so-called ‘metagraphical explanations’ in other words, they were asked to explain verbally their own written productions. We observed the written productions and the metagraphical explanations of the participants irrespective of whether these were standard or non-standard written productions. The results show that the verbal explanations, rather than being related to the grammatical case of plural, for the participants frequently refer to their concrete knowledge of number. The fact that these slow learners possess general cognitive abilities which are substantially more developed than their linguistic abilities suggests that the processes used to acquire the linguistic notion of plural in French are based on structures established by analogy, taking their roots in a cognitive notion of number which seems common to all apprentice writers.