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

Malin Ågren,Marie-Eve Michot,Pascale Hadermann,Cyrille Granget,Isabelle Stabarin,Sonia Gerolimich

doi:10.3390/languages6010007

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.

Highlights

Previous literature on the acquisition1 of spoken French has shown that subject–verb (SV) agreement in number is a difficult morphosyntactic phenomenon for L2 learners (Bartning and Schlyter 2004; Howard 2006; Michot 2014; Véronique 2009, among others)
An alternative hypothesis (H1) would be that the morphosyntactic properties of the L1 will play a prominent role in the acquisition of SV agreement in number in spoken French. If this is the case, we expect learners with an L1 characterized by a rich SV agreement in person and number (Italian) to perform significantly better than learners with an L1 characterized by a partial SV agreement system (Dutch and German) or a L1 that lacks SV agreement altogether (Swedish)
The corpus includes 5945 verb forms produced with third person singular and plural subjects

Summary

Introduction

Previous literature on the acquisition of spoken French has shown that subject–verb (SV) agreement in number (third person singular vs. plural) is a difficult morphosyntactic phenomenon for L2 learners (Bartning and Schlyter 2004; Howard 2006; Michot 2014; Véronique 2009, among others). The frequency distribution of verb forms in native speaker discourse is biased towards the singular, meaning that the singular form of the verb is always much more frequent than the equivalent plural form (Ågren and van de Weijer 2013a). This fact makes the singular verb form more salient to language learners and easier to memorize and to access than the plural form

Methods

Results

Conclusion