The acquisition of variable phenomena: The case of past participle agreement in Quebec French
The acquisition of variable phenomena: The case of past participle agreement in Quebec French

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the use of past participle agreement by young preschool children and adults speaking Québec French. The results show that this type of optional agreement in the target grammar is a late acquisition, starting probably in school-aged children. The main features of the use of past participle agreement seem to be lexical and individual variation, overgeneralisation of the non-agreeing form, and use of agreement in incorrect constructions. Following a distinction between inconsistent and variable input, it is proposed that past participle agreement in Québec French is a type of inconsistent input and as such it is regularized by children as non-agreement. It is proposed that the underlying syntactic mechanism is inert, while the optionality comes from variation over the choice of different lexical forms as a function of their frequency in the input.

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