Syntactic complexity and inflections in the written production of L1 and L2 French

Abstract

Very little is known about the effect of syntactic complexity on written language production. This study investigated the effect of syntactic complexity on the accuracy of gender marking in written L1 and L2 French. We conducted two experiments in which L1 learners (n = 28) and L2 learners (n = 26) of French were asked to complete a fill-in-the-gap task. The test items were controlled for three types of gender agreement configurations with different syntactic complexity. The results show that the syntactic complexity of the agreement configuration has an effect on the accuracy of both L1 and L2 written gender marking. We conclude that, similarly to spoken L1 production, the accuracy of gender marking is influenced by syntactic complexity. Furthermore, we conclude that the observed effect of syntactic complexity does not only hold for L2 learners at the beginners level, but is still present in advanced L2 learners of French.

Keywords

• inflections
• L1 acquisition
• L2 acquisition
• French
• syntactic complexity