Conceptualisation et verbalisation de la collision instrumentée en français L2 : une étude expérimentale et longitudinale auprès d'adulte syriens réinstallés en France

Background: The sociocultural dimension of second language (L2) acquisition by adult learners in the host country has already been the subject of longitudinal studies. Our study revisits this dimension in a socio-cognitive approach to the acquisition of L2 French by Syrian adults who have resettled in France for several years. In the wake of neo-Whorfian studies on the link between conceptualization and verbalization, our research focuses on the expression of a complex event - collision - in a little-studied conceptual domain - cause. The aim of this work is to report experimentally and longitudinally on the effect of interculturation and proficiency in French on the conceptualization and verbalization of a collision event in L2 French. To this end, we established an integrative theoretical framework of Habel & Tappe's (1999) psycholinguistic conceptualizer model and Event Segmentation Theory (Zacks et al. 2007), which we applied to the analysis of collision scenes designed to test the Iconicity Principle (Haiman 1983) formulated in semantic typology and the Attentional Focus Hypothesis (Swallow & Wang 2020) drawing on cultural psychology.Method: Our longitudinal study of the conceptualization and verbalization of collision is based on two experimental tasks, a non-linguistic segmentation task of collision events and a verbalization task of the same events using eye tracking. These events vary according to two conditions: contiguity (causal and resultant sub-events contiguous or not) and cultural context (protagonists physically resembling Syrian participants or not). The segmentation, verbalization and eye-tracking data obtained were compared with the participants' self-assessments of their proficiency in French, as well as with scores from the Vancouver Index of Acculturation. To test the effect of collision event properties (contiguity, context) and participants' experience (proficiency, interculturation) on conceptualization and verbalization at both time points, we conducted qualitative analyses of collision utterances and verbs, as well as quantitative analyses (mixed logistic regression models, correlation tests, cluster analyses).Results: This work showed the effect of L2 French learners’ degree of interculturation on their conceptualization of events (behavior and visual attention), in interaction with their French proficiency : (1) high interculturation towards French culture leads to more analytical segmentation patterns; (2) higher proficiency leads to a restructuring of reading direction preference from left to right; (3) in case of lower proficiency, the degree of interculturation towards each culture (dominant and origin) influences fixation durations towards the causer, with interculturation towards French culture leading to fewer prolonged fixations and vice versa for interculturation towards Syrian culture. These results suggest that language and conceptual development in L2 French is still possible after 5 years of immersion. It also corroborates the results of studies in semantic typology, showing an effect of the [± contiguous] character of a causal situation on its conceptualization and verbalization. Our analyses show a clear preference for encoding the causer as the subject of the collision utterance, in accordance with the Agent-first Principle, and an underspecification of the resulting event.Conclusion: It seems necessary to take into account the relationship between the degree of interculturation and language development in second-language acquisition research, particularly when confronting verbal and behavioral data.

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