L'impact du transfert de la L1 et des relations de cohérence implicites sur la lecture et la rédaction en L2 : analyses de corpus et preuves expérimentales

While so called ‘false friends’ or false cognates (e.g., French enfant ‘child’ vs. English infant) are assumed to complicate the acquisition and mastery of conceptual words in a second language (e.g., Janke & Kolokonte, 2105), several corpus studies (e.g., Granger & Tyson, 1996) indicate that negative transfer from the speakers L1’s can equally emerge for words carrying procedural functions (such as since, if, furthermore). We believe that an example of such an error might be the inappropriate use of alors (‘so’) by German speaking learners of French to indicate specifications (*La femme, alors ma voisine, est sympa ‘*The woman ALORS my neighbor is nice’), given its similarity with the German connective also (‘that is’). As there is, however, no evidence to this claim, we attempt to fill this gap in the literature. In our present study, we first analyze uses of alors within text productions by German speaking learners of French (Corpus EFAGG, more than 100.00 words). In a second step, we complement these findings with empirical investigations, i.e., we test to which extent L2 learners are able to detect this error in in a sentence evaluation task (part two) and whether it perturbs the processing in a self-paced-reading task (part three). Preliminary results show that while German speaking learners of French produce indeed this error while writing, it is, despite a certain uncertainty, rather well detected in a sentence evaluation task