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