The acquisition of a complex morphological paradigm by L1 and L2 children

The performances of 690 L1 and L2 submersion children of grades 4 to 6 on a test of past tense (passe simple) production in French are compared with the aim of assessing how the two groups of children cope with learning a morphological form belonging to a complex paradigm. Homophony with other verbal forms of the paradigm (syncretisms) appears to play a role in the children’s answers. L2 submersion children have significantly lower scores than L1 children and they differ from L1 children in tending to overapply the regular ending. They also seem to be more attentive to agreement and to the visual form of the words than L1 children.