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The influence of lexical aspect and input frequency in the L2 French of adult beginners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2010

Anita Thomas
Anita Thomas*
Affiliation:
Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden. anita.thomas@rom.lu.se
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Abstract

This article presents a study of the variation found in the oral production of verbs in L2 French by adult beginners with Swedish as L1. The study deals with the production of the two main forms of regular verbs in spoken French, a short form /parl/ and a long form /parle/, in present-tense and infinitive contexts. Learners at beginner stages use these two forms invariantly in both finite and non-finite contexts. The aim of this study is to investigate the choice of the invariant forms made by the learners. This is done by testing the influence of lexical aspect and input frequency. The investigation is made with concrete data from input sources. The results from both a free production task and an imitation test suggest that input frequency contributes more significantly than lexical aspect, although both factors overlap for most of the studied verbs.

Keywords

beginner learnersFrench L2frequencyimitation testinputlexical aspectmorphological variation
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 33 , Special Issue 2: The Nordic Languages and Second Language Acquisition Theory , October 2010 , pp. 169 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2010

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