Exploring the acquisition of the French subjunctive: local syntactic context or oral proficiency?

This chapter presents empirical evidence on the acquisition of a late-acquired form, the French subjunctive, collected from two elicited production tasks and a timed grammaticality judgement task. The study examined the influence of differences in L2 oral proficiency and local syntactic context (affirmative, adverbial and negative constructions) on the acquisition of the French subjunctive by English speaking university learners of French L2. The results suggest that L2 oral proficiency significantly affects the acquisition of the subjunctive, with high group learners performing more accurately than low group learners across a variety of different tasks. No clear effects of local syntactic context on the acquisition of the subjunctive were found