Acquisition of complement clitics and tense morphology in internationally adopted children acquiring French (original) (raw)

Acquisition of complement clitics and tense morphology in internationally adopted children acquiring French

The present study examined the language development of children adopted from China to examine possible early age effects with respect to their use of complement clitics, lexical diversity and verb morphology. We focused on these aspects of French because they distinguish second language learners of French and native French-speaking children with language impairment from children learning French as a native language and, in the case of object clitics and certain verb tenses, are relatively late to emerge in native speakers. Thus, it might be expected that they would be susceptible to the delayed onset of acquisition of French experienced by internationally adopted children. Language samples of twelve adopted children from 3;6 to 4;8 living in French-speaking families were analyzed and compared to those of non-adopted monolingual French-speaking children of the same age, sex and socio-economic status. The adopted and control children had similar levels of socio-emotional adjustment an...