The Acquisition of French

This book presents a thorough description of morphosyntactic knowledge developed by learners of French in four different learning situations — first language (L1) acquisition, second (L2) language acquisition, bilingualism, and acquisition by children with Specific Language Impairment — within the theoretical framework of generative grammar. This approach allows for multiple comparisons across acquisition contexts, which provides the reader with invaluable insights into the nature of the acquisition process. The book is divided into four parts each dealing with a major morphosyntactic domain of acquisition: the verbal domain, the pronominal domain, the nominal domain, and the CP domain. Each part contains four chapters, the first one presenting an overview of the basic facts and analyses of the relevant properties of French, and the next three focusing on the different acquisition contexts. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the acquisition of French and in language development in general. It is also meant to stimulate cross-linguistic research from a theoretical perspective.

Mary Ellen Scullen, University of Maryland, College Point, in French Review 84(6): 1349-1350:
With this comprehensive and extremely well-written monograph on the acquisition of French in several contexts, Philippe Prévost has accomplished a scholarly tour de force sure to please a wide audience. The book will certainly interest applied French linguists, especially those focusing on acquisition. Given its meticulous attention to the acquisition of morphosyntactic phenomena in both L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) contexts - including bilingual child language acquisition and acquisition by French L1 children with specific linguistic impairments (SLI) - the book will also merit a large readership among all acquisition researchers. In addition, Prévost brings a wealth of acquisition data to bear on important theoretical questions in the Universal Grammar (UG)/Minimalist Program and highlights the contributions that French acquisition research has made to the development of both syntactic and acquisition theory.