Orthographic Revision: The Case of Subject-Verb Agreement in French

Abstract

The chapter presents two experiments carried out on orthographic revision with children and adults. The first experiment aims to investigate the stage during which ‘rule proceduralization’, with regard to subject-verb agreement, occurs. On analysing the performance obtained from primary school children in two types of tasks: (1) to agree a dictated verb in context; (2) to detect and correct an error involving this kind of agreement, we found that there is a period (second and third years of primary school) during which children prove to be more able to detect and correct an agreement error, than to produce this agreement during writing. These results are explained in terms of the cognitive cost difference between these activities. The second research aims to study development of expertise in the detection of such agreement errors. Analysis of the performance of primary and secondary school children and adults, in a task consisting in detecting agreement errors in sentences presented one by one on a computer screen, reveals an expert profile of error detection, certainly due to an implicit learning of spatial cooccurrences between morphemes. From the point of view of the cognitive processes involved in production and revising, these results allow discussion, on the one hand, of the phenomenon of knowledge proceduralization (automatization of agreement processing for writing; automatization of agreement error detection processing), and on the other hand, of the role of implicit learning in the management of agreements.