Erroneous Feature Migration: Subject-Verb Agreement in French Using Linear Differences.
Carl L. Garrott · 1998
This study addressed two questions concerning subject-verb agreement and erroneous feature migration in French second language learners: whether multiple or single token items, elicit greater errors in subject-verb agreement, and whether linear distancencreases errors in agreement. _fr Empirical research suggests that a miOlatch in number between subject and verb occurs when the head noun is not proximate to the verb, particularly when a singular subject is combined with intervening relative clauses ending in a plural noun. There is little empirical research to support this view for French. The current study, using 40 college-level French second-language learners, found that (1) the condition SS + relative pronoun + V + N(plural) has a higher subject-verb error rate than other conditions; plural nouns may transmit number to the nearest verb even if the head noun is singular; and (2) erroneous feature migration and linear distance do correlate in this population, and learners who use a left-to-right probabilistic model to compute agreement appear to commit more errors. (MSE) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** ERRONEOUS FEATURE MIGRATION: SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT IN FRENCH USING LINEAR DIFFERENCES