Acquisition of adjectives in Quebec French as revealed by elicitation data

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study presents data from an elicitation study on French size and color adjectives in noun phrases (DPs), both early acquired structures. Thirty-two francophone children aged 3–5 years participated in the study. Adjectives were elicited using specially designed puzzles and spontaneous speech corpora. We observed that errors in French variable adjectives are produced in the early acquisition stages, especially in the context of feminine colour DPs. We propose that the source of difficulty for feminine variable adjectives is the retrieval of a lexicalized form that competes with the masculine adjective denoting the same concept.