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Descartes University to the second author. We thank the reviewers for their very helpful and comprehensive comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1 The interplay between phonology and syntax in French-speaking children with specific language impairment Background. This study investigated the relationship between phonological and syntactic disorders of French-speaking children with SLI in production. Aims. This article compares three theories (pure phonological theory, surface theory and mapping theory) of language developmental disorders, all of which view phonological difficulties as the main reason for the children’s problems. Methods and procedures. The linguistic parameters (salience, phonological complexity, syntactic complexity, lexical/functional word, semantic/syntactic weight) that are fundamental to these theories were identified. The validity of these parameters was then tested against the phonological and syntactic results obtained by children with SLI and control children. Nin