The effect of the subject's phonological salience on the plural form of alternating verbs in French L2: priming or redundancy?

Our study aims to describe the influence of the subject type and its possible phonologically salient nature on verbal morphology and agreement in French interlanguage by German, Italian and Swedish learners. It is inspired by the research of Nadasdi (2001), Howard (2006) and Michot (2014), respectively dealing with this issue in FL2 corpuses of English- and Dutch-speaking learners. Their analyses led to opposite results, with absence of subject type effect among English learners and presence among Dutch learners of FL2. In order to better understand the learning process, we created a data collection context as similar as possible with the three groups of learners, which allows us to show that Swedish learners are more sensitive to the effect of the subject type and its phonological salience on verbal agreement in a plural context. This would tend to confirm the priming hypothesis for this group while the other two groups do not allow to favor any hypothesis. L1 could therefore constitute a relevant criterion for better understanding the learning process of verbal forms in FL2, although developmental stages are not to be neglected, as our intra-group analysis of German speakers will confirm.