La dictée de français et les étudiants italophones. Analyse exploratoire des erreurs de morphologie verbale

What can we discover about verbal morphology acquisition when we look at Italian L1 learners writing under dictation? We present a preliminary analysis of a written corpus made up of 1st year undergraduate students written examinations in French L2. The nature of the dictation task, the characteristics of French verbal morphology as well as several discrepencies between both languages orthographic systems – major transparency against opacity – lead us to choose a theoretical framework that focuses on the phonic form. The concept of "supplétion" (Bonami and al., 2003), that allows to redefine regularity in terms of suppletive inflection and stem allomorphy, enables us to distinguish between three major categories of verbs based on their phonomorphological behavior. A quantitative analysis of spelling error distribution shows that the most irregular verbs generate less spelling errors in contrast to verbs presenting stem allomorphy in their inflection paradigm. As for the regular verbs, they generate 62% of spelling errors on inflection morpheme. Qualitative analysis of some verbal contexts show systematic spelling errors at various linguistic levels. We suggest that certain verbal contexts might hinder segmentation and alter verbal form recognition.