Acquisition et mise en oeuvre de la morphologie flexionnelle en francais langue étrangère

This article is based on an analysis of two corpora in French as a foreign language by Swedish learners; one cross-sectional and the other longitudinal. These two corpora lent themselves to different approaches: a linguistic approach which stressed the developmental profile of agreement in number; and a more cognitive approach which analyzed various aspects of explicit and implicit knowledge in the implementation of inflectional morphology of the plural form. We observed that nominal agreement is achieved earlier than verbal agreement, just as is the case in French as a first language, and that the regular mode (rote +s/+nt) is over-employed in the irregular domain. We studied, among other things, the impact of standard frequency of morphemes -s and -nt, as well as the frequency of occurence of some exceptions to the rule. Cognitively oriented analysis showed that learners apply the morphological rule in a rather consious and explicit manner. The most frequent irregular verbs (i.e. ils sont/ont) are the only ones to be produced in a more implicit fashion.