Aspects of the Acquisition of the French Verb System by Young Speakers of English and French in Quebec and Ontario.

Three studies are presented, each of which is a comparison of the acquisition of an aspect of the French verb system by three groups of speakers. The speakers are: young Anglophones learning French as a second language in an early French immersion program in Montreal; young monolingual Francophones attending elementary French language schools in Quebec; and young bilingual Francophones enrolled in elementary French language schools in Ontario. The three aspects of the French verb system under study are the syntax of the bare (i.e., prepositionless) infinitival complement of motion verbs, the morphology of the pronominal verbs (i.e., reflexive pronoun plus verb), and the morphology of the past participles (i.e., stem plus affix). Each study presents and attempts to explain the language acquisition errors committed by the three speaker groups as well as the differences in the language acquisition stages reached by the three speaker groups. (Author/MSE)