Volume 42, Issue 4

This article examines the relationship between group and individual patterns of variation in one area of the grammar: verbal morphology. The results of studies of the acquisition of English and Hungarian verbal morphology by Chinese learners show that individual patterns of variation closely match group patterns on several dimensions. Multivariate analysis shows that frequency and perceptual saliency affect verb marking by all Chinese acquirers of English and Hungarian in a similar manner. In addition, separate quantitative analyses of individual speakers show that all the Chinese learners of English considered here are approximately twice as likely to mark perfective verbs for past tense as to mark imperfective verbs. These convergent results suggest that for first order constraints such as aspect, perceptual salience, and frequency, individual results do in fact match group patterns and that we are justified from an empirical and a theoretical viewpoint in reporting group results in studies of second language acquisition (SLA).

Previous investigations of the variable marking of past time by the L2 learner have given rise to a number of hypotheses which predict the patterns of acquisition and use of past time markers in interlanguage (IL). However, given the complicity between their predictions, it has been previously noted that hypotheses such as the aspect and discourse hypotheses can be supported with the same data. In an attempt to distinguish between the effects of such multiple constraints in advanced French IL, this paper presents quantitative findings to suggest that no single factor exclusively outweighs another, but rather, the factors ‘interact’ in their effect, such that the causes of aspectuo-temporal variation are not singular, but indeed multiple.

The relationship between group and individual has been explored within the variationist paradigm. In L1, group patterns of variation are replicated by the individual. Second language acquisition research is concerned with the individual learner, but second language acquisition variationist researchers tend to group learners. Little empirical evidence exists that such grouping is valid, given the importance of individual variation. This article investigates whether it is meaningful to group learners. This is a longitudinal, quantitative study of the acquisition of variation by Irish speakers of French L2 over three years, of which one is a year abroad experience. Participants are five advanced learners, twenty years old, with five years of French classes at secondary school and two at university. A computer (Varbrul) analysis shows similar patterns in group and individual, in the deletion of ne. Theoretical implications are that it is legitimate to apply group standards to individual speakers and that native speaker variation acquisition is linked to a prolonged stay in the native speaker community.

This article is one among a series of studies on the acquisition of patterns of linguistic variation observable in the speech of native speakers of Canadian French by French immersion (FI) students. The present study is centred on deletion of the central vowel schwa, a widespread feature of casual spoken French. In this study, FI students are compared with same age native speakers of Ontario French. Our study has arrived at the following main findings: (i) FI students delete schwa much less frequently than do the speakers of Ontario French; (ii) FI students observe the same phonetic constraints that influence schwa deletion in native Ontario French; (iii) FI students do not observe the constraint of topic formality which is observable in native Ontario French; and (iv) FI students who have had extracurricular contacts with native speakers of French display higher rates of schwa deletion than the FI students who have not had such contacts.

This article is drawn from a large-scale ongoing study on linguistic progress in advanced French as a second language (FL2). The performance of 48 English-speaking students who spent their third year of university in France (the ‘experimental’ group)has been compared to that of 39 classmates who chose to stay and study at home in southern Ontario, Canada (the ‘control’ group). The analysis presented here will be limited to three morpho-phonemic variables where native speaker usage can differ considerably from official norms, i.e., ‘liaison’, schwa and the negative particle ne . Results generally point to different pronunciation difficulties at the advanced level than at the beginners' level. Also, comparisons between the experimental and the control groups lead to a reappraisal of the notions of ‘norm’ and phonetic ‘progress’ in spoken French.

Sociolinguistic rules governing choice of pronouns of address are notoriously difficult in French, despite the fact that the number of variants is rather limited: the more formal vous versus the more informal tu . Children with French as L1 learn to use pronouns of address appropriately as part of their socialization process. The learning curve is much steeper for instructed learners of French and many never reach the summit. The present contribution focuses on the effects of situational and sociobiographical variables on the self-reported and actual use of pronouns of address in native and non-native French. Data on self-reported pronoun use in different situations were collected from 125 participants through a written questionnaire. A corpus of conversations between native (n = 9) and non-native (n = 52) speakers of French provided data on the actual use of address pronouns.