The emergence of tense and agreement in child L2 French1

The present study examined the acquisition of tense and agreement by L2 learners of French. We looked at whether the features <tns> and <agr> and the categories AGRP and TP emerged simultaneously or in sequence in the learners ’ grammars. We conducted interviews with English-speaking children acquiring French as a second language and with grade-matched native-speaker controls once a year for three years. The data were analysed for the productive use of morphosyntax encoding tense and agreement. Results revealed that items encoding agreement emerged before items encoding tense, suggesting that the abstract grammatical structures associated with these morphosyntax items emerge in sequence. The findings are interpreted with respect to three prevailing views on the acquisition of functional phrase structure in L2 acquisition: the Lexical Transfer/Minimal Trees hypothesi