The impact of crosslinguistic influence on the online processing of connectives in L2 French

The mastery of connectives like néanmoins, en effet and donc in French is a well-known problem in corpus-based studies of learner language (e.g., Lamiroy, 1994; Degand & Hadermann, 2009;). However, the cause of these difficulties remains highly debated as only few experiments have so far been conducted on this topic (e.g., Zufferey et al. 2015; Wetzel et al., 2020). In order to investigate the role of crosslinguistic influence, we compared the ability of two groups of learners to master the connective alors in French. On the one hand, a group of German-speaking learners who typically misuse this connective to convey a specification as in (1), a misuse that could come from a crosslinguistic influence of the German also. On the other hand, a group of English-speaking learners who do not produce this misuse in corpus data. (1) * L’arbre, alors le sapin que j’ai planté, est vieux. * ‘The tree, CONNECTIVE, the fir I planted, is old’. In an on-going set of experiments, we compare the ability of these two groups of learners as well as a control group of native speakers to discriminate between correct (consequence) and incorrect (specification) uses of alors across an offline judgement and an online reading task. In the judgement task, our results indicate that even though both groups of learners provide similar judgements of the incorrect uses of alors, the group of German-speaking learners have a lower ability than English-speaking learners to assess correct uses of alors, and also rate lower the correct way to produce a specification in French with the connective c’est-à-dire. In the online reading task using self-paced reading, we expect that because of their lower sensitivity to the correct uses of alors, German-speaking learners will have different reading patterns of correct and incorrect sentences compared to the other groups. Finally, we will also assess whether the sensitivity to detect the misuse despite crosslinguistic influences can be predicted by the overall language proficiency of the learners