The mastery of verb agreement in French and its link to the complexity of NPs in students' writing

Abstract

This paper presents results related to subject-verb agreement errors made by 6th grade students (aged 10-11) and by 8th grade students (aged 13-14). Starting from the observation that there is no significant improvement in the verbal agreement made by 8th grade students in comparison with 6th grade students, we propose that this lack of improvement over time is due to the complexity of the type of syntactic contexts used by the two groups of students, which has an effect on verbal agreement. These contexts are: 1) the internal structure of subject NPs, and 2) the syntactic configuration. Our results show that the 8th grade students produce a greater proportion of complex subject NPs than the 6th grade students, as well as more constructions with a specific syntactic configuration and a complex NP. A mixed effects lo-gistic regression indicates there is a significant effect of the NP type and of the agreement within the NP. Our study adds to previous studies on verb agreement as it is based on data produced in a writing situa-tion. It also contributes to documenting and supporting the concept of syntactic maturity, which claims that older students use more complex syntactic structures than younger ones.