Input and pattern frequencies matter for acquiring French past participle forms

University The French past participle presents a complex problem for language learners. Learners must not only acquire regular and irregular forms, but they must learn these forms separately for four verb types (see 1). Moreover, each type contains a different proportion of regular members, and some types contain more verbs and/or higher frequency verbs than others (Nicoladis & Paradis 2006). Recent studies have focused on the role of frequency in the acquisition of French past participles (Nicoladis et al. 2007, Paradis et al. 2007, Royle 2008), but this work only differentiates between regular and irregular verbs. Here I take a finer-grained approach exploring strategies children use to form past participles within verb types. This study examines the effects of verb type and input frequency (measured in child-directed speech from childes corpora) on past participle accuracy in an elicited production task with 22 normally developing monolingual French-speaking children (12 aged 3;8-4;7, 10 aged 5;1-5;8). I presented two-panel scenes designed to elicit past participles for 20 verbs, 5 of each type. Within each type, I elicited regular and irregular verbs, except in type 1 where all past participles are regular. I described the action in the first panel using the infinitive and prompted the child t