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This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and grammatical features is mediated by communicative function. This is especially evident when assessing oral versus written exam tasks, where the modality of a task may intersect with register-induced variation in linguistic output. This article presents the results of an empirical study in which we measured the diversity and sophistication of four-word lexical bundles extracted from a corpus of French proficiency exams. Analysis revealed that the diversity of noun-based bundles was a significant predictor of written proficiency scores and the sophistication of verb-based bundles was a significant predictor of proficiency scores across both modes, suggesting that communicative function as well as the constraints of online planning mediated the effect of lexicogrammatical phenomena on proficiency scores. Importantly, lexicogrammatical measures were better predictors of proficiency than solely lexical-based measures, which speaks to the potential utility of considering lexicogrammatical competence on scoring rubrics.

This study aims to advance the understanding of sociolinguistic competence among near-native speakers and to further knowledge about the acquisition of variable structures. We conduct a quantitative analysis of variable future-time expression in informal conversations between near-native and native speakers of French. In addition to examining linguistic constraints that have been investigated in previous research, we build on prior work by introducing a new factor that enables us to consider the role that formality of the variants plays in the use of variable future-time expression. We conclude by comparing these new findings to those for the same dataset and other variable structures (namely, negation and interrogatives, Donaldson, 2016, 2017) and by advocating for more research that consists of multiple, complementary analyses of the same dataset.

The processing of time activates a spatial left-to-right mental timeline, where past events are "located" to the left and future events to the right. If past and future words activate this mental timeline, then the processing of such words should interfere with hand movements that go in the opposite direction. To test this hypothesis, we conducted 3 visual lexical decision tasks with conjugated (past/future) verbs and pseudoverbs. In Experiment 1, participants moved a pen to the right or left of a trackpad to indicate whether a visual stimulus was a real word or not. Grammatical time and hand movements for yes responses went in the same direction in the congruent condition (e.g., past tense/leftward movement) but in opposite directions in the incongruent condition. Analyses showed that space-time incongruency significantly increased reaction times. In Experiment 2, we investigated the role of movement in this effect. Participants performed the same task by responding with a trackpad or a mouse, both of which required lateral movement through space, or a static keypress. We again obtained the space-time congruency effect, but only when the decision required movement through space. In Experiments 1 and 2, stimuli were preceded by a temporal prime. In Experiment 3, participants performed the same task without any prime. Results replicated the congruency effect, demonstrating that it does not depend upon temporal word priming. Altogether, results suggest automatic activation of a left-right mental timeline during word recognition, reinforcing the claim that the concept of Time is grounded in movement through space.

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase "la petite" followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a noun or a verb. We assigned the children to a noun condition or a verb condition. Before the test, those in the noun condition were exposed to sentences where "la petite" predicted nouns, and those in the verb condition to sentences where "la petite" predicted verbs. At testing, 3- to 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, from the verb condition looked at the verb interpretation longer than did the children in the noun condition. This suggests a progression in children's ability to rely on input to adapt their predictions in language comprehension.

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or not, like English, their first language (L1) encodes aspect grammatically (French) or only via lexical means (German, Dutch). The English and the higher proficiency French participants showed a processing asymmetry in their online reading of the temporarily ambiguous sentences, assumed to be caused by the difference in the aspectual perspective a comprehender takes when initial verbs appear in the past simple vs. the past progressive. In contrast, the German and Dutch learners, irrespective of proficiency, treated both progressive and simple sentences in the same way, despite the fact that all the L2 learners were matched according to their metalinguistic knowledge of English aspectual distinctions. Furthermore, despite patterning with the German learners online, the Dutch L2 learners' offline judgments were more akin to those of the English native speakers and the French L2 learners, showing an effect of aspect, which could be argued to lend support to the idea that progressive aspect may be becoming grammaticalized in Dutch. Taken together, the results of this study add to our growing understanding of cross-linguistic influences during online L2 sentence processing, and differences between L2 parsing and learners' metalinguistic L2 performance.

This paper presents the findings of an experiment in which a group of 17 French post-secondary EFL learners used Google to self-correct several "untreatable" written errors. Whether or not error correction leads to improved writing has been much debated, some researchers dismissing it is as useless and others arguing that error feedback leads to more grammatical accuracy. In her response to Truscott (1996), Ferris (1999) explains that it would be unreasonable to abolish correction given the present state of knowledge, and that further research needed to focus on which types of errors were more amenable to which types of error correction. In her attempt to respond more effectively to her students' errors, she made the distinction between "treatable" and "untreatable" ones: the former occur in "a patterned, rule-governed way" and include problems with verb tense or form, subject-verb agreement, run-ons, noun endings, articles, pronouns, while the latter include a variety of lexical errors, problems with word order and sentence structure, including missing and unnecessary words. Substantial research on the use of search engines as a tool for L2 learners has been carried out suggesting that the web plays an important role in fostering language awareness and learner autonomy (e.g. Shei 2008a, 2008b; Conroy 2010). According to Bathia and Richie (2009: 547), "the application of Google for language learning has just begun to be tapped." Within the framework of this study it was assumed that the students, conversant with digital technologies and using Google and the web on a regular basis, could use various search options and the search results to self-correct their errors instead of relying on their teacher to provide direct feedback. After receiving some in-class training on how to formulate Google queries, the students were asked to use a customized Google search engine limiting searches to 28 information websites to correct up to ten "untreatable" errors occurring in two essays completed in class. The findings indicate that a majority of students successfully use material from the various snippets of texts appearing on the Google results pages to improve their writing.

We examined French-learning toddlers' sensitivity to Subject-Verb agreement with conjoined subjects. In French, a conjoined NP triggers plural agreement even when made up of individual singular NPs. Processing of this infrequent structure in the input (see Corpus Analyses) requires going beyond surface patterns of non-adjacent dependencies to abstract, feature-based syntactic knowledge. In Experiment 1, results revealed a significant grammaticality effect in 24-month-olds, but not in 18-month-olds, with no interaction with the condition (with either conjoined or non-conjoined agreement; all tested with Head-Turn Preference Procedure). In Experiment 2, 30-month-olds (tested with conjoined agreement only) showed the same pattern as 24-month-olds: a strong grammaticality effect limited to the first half of the experiment. Overall, these results provide some support to the hypothesis that 24- and 30-month-olds (but not 18-month-olds) have abstract knowledge of SV agreement with conjoined subjects, although it imposes a high processing cost. Importantly, this abstract syntactic sensitivity precedes the earliest evidence of simple agreement comprehension.

This study adopts Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) theory of linguistic typology and Slobin's (2003, 2004) hypothesis of Thinking-for-Speaking to investigate the use of additional expressions of Manner in the expression of Motion events by Chinese EFL learners in comparison with French EFL learners. The aim is to find out the Thinking-for-Speaking effect in the acquisition of the English Motion event expressions for speakers with typologically different L1 background. It is revealed that Chinese EFL learners benefit from the Thinking-for-Speaking in L1 compared with French EFL learners. Chinese Language teachers can emphasise the similarities between Chinese and English to enhance English learners' acquisition of motion event expressions.

Based on Sloin's (1996b) thinking for speaking approach, the study examines L1 influence on the use of English deictic Motion verbs for Chinese EFL learners and French EFL learners. The aim is to find out whether language learners will be influenced by the particular Thinking for Speaking acquired in L1 in the process of L2 acquisition. It is revealed that there is an overuse of English deictic Motion verbs among French EFL learners due to boundary crossing constraint in French, which results from L1 transfer. On the other hand, Chinese EFL learners benefit from positive transfer due to the similarity between L1 and L2 and their overuse of English deictic Motion verbs results from simplification. Whereas L1 influence exists among Chinese EFL learners in the use of go rather than the more target like "come".

This article discusses structural factors responsible for a number of subtle differences in the outcome of language contact in Brussels (Belgium) and Strasbourg (France), and suggest that sociolinguistic factors have little explanatory power in this area. Differences between the rules for past participle formation in Dutch as spoken in Brussels and Alsatian as spoken in Strasbourg are claimed to be responsible for the differences in the integration patterns of French past participles that maintain French morphology, the so-called unintegrated French past participles. The latter occur only in French-Alsatian contact but not in French-Dutch contact. Thus, this article offers counterevidence to Thomason and Kaufman's (1998) claim that the sociolinguistic history of speakers and not the structure of their language is the primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact. Evidence from other bilingual communities along the Romance-Germanic frontier provides additional support in favor of the hypothesis that structural rather than sociolinguistic factors are responsible for the contact patterns observed along the frontier. (Contains 22 references and 2 tables.) (Author/VWL)

The present study applies a multidimensional methodological approach to the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax. It focuses on evaluating the degree of productivity of an infrequent subject-verb agreement pattern in the early acquisition of French and considers the explanatory role played by factors such as input frequency, semantic transparency of the agreement markers, and perceptual factors in accounting for comprehension of agreement in number (singular vs. plural) in an experimental setting. Results on a pointing task involving pseudoverbs demonstrate significant comprehension of both singular and plural agreement in children aged 2;6. The experimental results are shown not to reflect input frequency, input marker reliability on its own, or lexically driven knowledge. We conclude that toddlers have knowledge of subject-verb agreement at age 2;6 which is abstract and productive despite its paucity in the input.

The main goal of this article is to study the respective role of language typology and context on the noun to verb asymmetry in caregiver speech. The speech of 20 French- and 20 Turkish-speaking mothers addressed to their children in two different situations (book-reading and toy-play) were analysed in terms of noun to verb ratio as well as in terms of object-oriented to action-oriented utterances ratio. Only a tendency to noun orientation was shown in French mothers. Both groups of mothers behave in the same ways in both contexts with more nouns and object-oriented utterances in the book-reading context vs more verbs and action-oriented utterances in toy-play. These results confirm a more important role of context on mothers' linguistic behaviours than language typology.

Dynamic analyses of language growth tell us how vocabulary and grammar develop and how the two might be intertwined. Analyses of growth curves between 17 and 42 months, based on longitudinal data for 34 children, revealed interesting patterns of vocabulary and grammatical developments. They showed that these patterns were nonlinear, but with coinciding peaks of growth, suggesting a bilateral relationship between acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. A more detailed analysis of specific components of vocabulary (nouns, verbs, grammatical words) and grammar showed that each followed its own developmental course, but that its growth rates were likely to be negatively or positively correlated with those of other components. For example, a faster rate for acquiring nouns coincided with a slower rate for verbs. Last, an assessment of intra-individual variability in three children showed that mean scores obscure individual profiles.

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds' interpretation of right-dislocated sentences ("noun"-verb, "noun") where the presence of clear, language-specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right-dislocated sentences containing well-known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface-to-meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions.

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien "mort"], in English, the "dead" little dog, vs. [le petit chien] ["mord"], in English, the little dog "bites", where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition. (Contains 4 figures and 9 footnotes.)

The purpose of this experiment, conducted with second-grade children (mean age: 7;8), was to examine the hypothesis that less skilled comprehenders in a reading situation suffer an impairment in spoken language comprehension and, more specifically, in the on-line processing of anaphoric pronouns. Skilled and less skilled comprehenders performed a cross-modal naming task investigating the effects of pronoun gender and pragmatic inference from the verb on the integration of two successive sentences. Results revealed different patterns of effects in the two groups. The skilled comprehenders integrated on-line sentences by relying on pronoun gender and verb meaning. Pronoun gender appeared to exert a dominant influence relative to verb bias. In the less skilled comprehenders, on-line integration was not systematic, being dependent on the meaning of the verb and the proximity of the referent. Complementary analyses revealed similar patterns of effects among less skilled comprehenders, whether they were good decoders or poor decoders. These results show that less skilled comprehenders are developmentally delayed compared with their skilled peers, and extend the language impairment hypothesis to cover discourse-level processes.

This section consists of six essays dealing with: (1) current trends in French linguistics; (2) French possessive pronouns; (3) contemporary French novelists; (4) "happiness" in France; (5) the Belgian playwright Michel Ghelderode; and (6) the pedagogical use of popular songs. (AM)

Illustrates variation affecting the position of pronouns in complex verb phrases among native French speakers. Describes the methods used to verify the hypothesis that there exists a correlation between individual hesitation and lack of consensus in the community. Analyzes data from questionnaires administered to 551 persons in Switzerland and France. (MES)

Four activities for the French language classroom are described, including exploration of the relationships between the perfect, imperfect, and pluperfect tenses; an introductory French geography activity; vocabulary development through creation of new words; and exercises to enhance comprehension of the titles and subtitles of newspaper articles. (MSE)

Differences between verbs of perception in English and French have often been a subject of theoretical conjecture, but seldom studied empirically. Four such verbs (En. hear, see, Fr. entendre, voir) were thus inventoried in a 13.5m-word bidirectional English/French translation corpus. A statistically significant difference between translators and authors was found for hear and entendre. Correlations between source and target texts were statistically significant for all verbs. Quantitative analysis of random samples revealed five regular alternatives to word-for-word translation. Qualitative data support the hypothesis that verbs of perception may follow different "evidential strategies" in English and French. An approach combining quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify translators closest to target language norms offers a new model for researchers and translators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Nigidius' fragment 9 Swoboda, which is included in a passage of Nonius' De compendiosa doctrina (p. 58, 12-16 Lindsay). Although the text is very brief, many emendations have been proposed throughout the centuries. The passage seems very obscure in terms of its textual coherence. A new reading, including a brief extract from the Carmen Saliare contained therein, pays attention to the consensus codicum. The passage is interpreted in terms of an etymological explanation, Stoic in character, of the verb tintĭnīre, exemplified by a phrase taken from the Carmen Saliare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterised by persistent difficulties that affect language abilities in otherwise normally developing children (Leonard, 2014). It remains challenging to identify young children affected by SLI in French. We tested oral production of the passé composé tense in 19 children in kindergarten and first grade with SLI aged from 5;6 to 7;4 years. All children were schooled in a French environment, but with different linguistic backgrounds. We used an Android application, Jeu de verbes (Marquis et al., 2012), with six verbs in each of four past participle categories (ending in -é, -i, -u, and other irregulars). We compared their results and error types to those of control children (from Marquis, 2012-2014) matched for gender, age, languages spoken at home, and parental education. Results show that children with SLI do not master the passé composé in the same way as typical French children do, at later ages than previously shown in the literature. This task shows potential for oral language screening in French-speaking children in kindergarten and first grade, independently of language background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is extensive evidence for early parameter setting in the syntactic productions of young children, much less is known about parameter setting before production starts. Franck et al. (2011) showed, for the first time, sensitivity to the VO/OV parameter at 19 months of age in children exposed to French, a VO language. Their experiment resorted to the combination of the preferential looking paradigm with pseudo-verbs and the weird word order paradigm. Here we report a closely resembling experiment with an OV language, Hindi–Urdu. We tested 20 children aged 19 months and the results show that children can parse the SOV sequences (and consequently show a looking preference for a transitive action) that generated random behaviour in the French experiment, while non-target sequences grant only random gazing behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the diagnostic accuracy and construct validity of a sentence repetition task that is commonly used for the identification of French children with specific language impairment (SLI). Thirty-four school-aged children with a confirmed, diagnostically based diagnosis of SLI, and 34 control children matched on age and nonverbal abilities performed the sentence repetition task. Two general scoring measures took into account the verbatim repetition of the sentence and the number of words accurately repeated. Moreover, five other scoring measures were applied to their answers in order to separately take into account their respect of lexical items, functional items, syntax, verb morphology, and the general meaning of the sentence. Results show good to high levels of sensitivity and specificity at the three cut-off points for all scoring measures. A principal component analysis revealed two factors. Scoring measures for the respect of functional words, syntax and verb morphology provided the largest loadings to the first factor, while scoring measures for the respect of lexical words and general semantics provided the largest loadings to the second factor. Sentence repetition appears to be a valuable tool to identify SLI in French children, and the ability to repeat sentences correctly is supported by two factors: a morphosyntactic factor and a lexical factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper discusses two questions: (1) what determines the Case of a possessor DP in inalienable possession (IPoss) constructions in French? and (2) How are the similarities between IPoss constructions and Obligatory Control construals accounted for? I will argue here that if Obligatory Control PRO is a copy/trace resulting from the movement of the controller as proposed by , IPoss constructions should also be derived through possessor raising and that the landing site of the possessor DP and its Case are determined by a syntactic representation of verb semantics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Two UG approaches to L2A propose different views of parameter resetting, depending on the capacity of interlanguage grammars to gain new values for uninterpretable functional features. Representational Deficit/Interpretability (e.g. Hawkins, 2003) maintains that parameter settings are limited to L1 values, whereas Full Access (e.g. Prévost & White, 2000) claims L2 parameter values may be gained; both assume initial transfer of L1 morphosyntactic settings. We examine verb morphosyntax of three advanced anglophone learners of L2 French, beginning with a description of the theoretical issues. We next report the study: the subjects, data collection and results. The final section discusses the data in terms of the two approaches, concluding that the results generally support FA over RD/I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author present a unified hypothesis about "focusing" conjunctional adverbs and subordinating conjunctions in French. A similar hypothesis is to be taken to hold at all romance languages as they argue after Piot mentioned above. At first, differences are to be observed between this case and another case in which the same conjunctional items are purely conjunctions. Then, They point out which are the common semantic and syntactic properties of the global "focus" operation related to all these items. In particular, this study highlights, as a result, the role of the subject nature of the conjoined first sentence and the syntactic-semantic nature of the verb-phrase in the second sentence. Another study will present the results about distinctions in this operation according to the particular significance of each different item.

Focuses on the implementation of the syntactic constraint of verb agreement on sentence processing in France. Examination of the influence of the variations in linguistic material interposed between the subject and the verb in detecting number-verb agreement violations; effect of number mismatch between local and head nouns on increasing detection times; Role of structural, morphological and semantic information in syntactic verb agreement processing.