La conjugaison du verbe en début de scolarisation

Abstract

We evaluated 35 Québec French children on their ability to produce regular, sub-regular, and irregular passé composé verb forms (ending in -é, -i, -u or other). An elicitation task was administered to children attending preschool or first grade. Target verbs were presented, along with images representing them, in infinitive (e.g., Marie va cacher ses poupées ‘Mary aux.pres. hide-inf. her dolls’= ‘Mary will hide her dolls’) and present tense (ex. Marie cache toujours ses poupées ‘Mary hide-3s. always her dolls’= ‘Mary always hides her dolls’) contexts, in order to prime the appropriate inflectional ending. Children were asked to produce target verb forms in the passé composé (perfect past) by answering the question ‘What did he/she do yesterday?’. Results show no reduction of erroneous productions or error types with age. Response patterns highlight morphological pattern frequency effects, in addition to productivity and reliability effects, on children’s mastery of French conjugation. These data have consequences for psycholinguistic models of regular and irregular morphology processing and acquisition.

Keywords

• verbs
• conjugation group
• elicitation
• French
• Android tablet