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 8th grade students do not perform better on verbal agreement than 6th grade students, we propose an explanation for the absence of a significant difference between the younger and the older students along the following line: the complexity of the syntactic contexts used by the two groups of students has a impact 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, and more constructions with a syntactic configuration and a complex NP. A mixed effects logistic regression indicates there is a significant effect of the NP type and of the agreement within the NP. Our study contributes to the studies relative to verb agreement in that it is based on data produced in an authentic writing situation. It also contributes to document and support the concept of syntactic maturity, which claims that older students use more complex syntactic structures than younger ones.