This collection of essays explores, in a generative framework, the acquisition of functional categories in French across four “acquisition contexts” (p. 1): first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) acquisition, bilingual L1 acquisition, and L1 acquisition by people with specific language impairment (SLI).

The volume is divided into two sections. The first section treats L1 and SLI. In the first chapter, Labelle and Valois examine grammaticality judgments concerning universal quantifiers (e.g., tous “all” or chacun “each one”) and indefinite partitive quantifiers (e.g., assez “enough” or beaucoup “a lot”) for children aged 3–5. They find that younger children tend not to differentiate these two quantifier types. De Cat's longitudinal study of three children's L1 production provides syntactic and prosodic evidence that child usage of stressed pronouns resembles adult pronoun dislocation, although the children often omit resumptive clitics. Paradis and Crago compare the determiner phrases (DPs) in the spontaneous speech of four groups: French-speaking 7-year-olds with SLI, Anglophone 7-year-olds acquiring French, and two control groups of normally developing French-speaking children. The SLI and L2 groups perform similarly, a result that supports an optional infinitive stage, refutes the argument for L1 DP functional structure transfer, and implies changes in SLI diagnosis. Hamann examines the verbal and determiner systems of two children with SLI. Her findings show that children with SLI might develop variably in nominal and verbal categories and that decelerated development in one of these areas might have implications for the development of object clitics.

The volume's second section treats SLA and bilingual contexts. Belletti and Cornelia Hamann find near absence of null subjects and root infinitives in the L2 French of two young children (aged 3–4 and 4–5) whose L1s are German and Italian, respectively. The older child (source language: German) displays features of transfer, whereas the L1 Italian child shows nearly errorless acquisition, even in areas in which French differs from Italian. They conclude that “only the German child shows the behavior of an L2-er [… whereas the] Italian child shows the pattern of bilingual acquisition that is almost flawless” (p. 169). Hawkins and Fransceschina examine L2 French acquisition of grammatical gender. They compare gender agreement accuracy of speakers whose L1 does not have gender (e.g., English) to that of speakers whose L1 has gender (e.g., Italian). They find a critical age effect for gender, after which acquirers cannot develop beyond probabilistic guesswork in deciding noun gender. Herschensohn conducted a longitudinal study of two Anglophones aged 16 and 17, in which she examined their acquisition of object clitics. The two subjects have patterned errors, which supports the hypothesis that their acquisition is influenced by Universal Grammar. This patterned interlanguage, which resembles L1 syntax, is taken as evidence for Full Transfer/Full Access. Hulk examines the acquisition of DPs in a Dutch/French bilingual girl. The data indicate four stages of DP acquisition: bare nouns, nouns with one prenominal determiner, nouns with two prenominal determiners, and nouns with two prenominal determiners as well as postnominal adjectives. Hulk found that bilingual and L1 acquisition of these features are similar. Müller examines longitudinal data from a French/German bilingual, focusing on subject and object omission. Müller concludes that her “study opens the possibility for crosslinguistic influence to be explained independently of the fact that there is a (first) ‘dominant’ language” (p. 300). Prévost examines root infinitives (RIs) in the L2 French of two Anglophone children, with a focus on verb types: stative, eventive, modal, and temporal. He observes two tendencies: “First, non-eventive predicates are restricted to finite declaratives, whereas eventive predicates can occur in either finite declaratives or in RIs. Second, the majority of RIs have a future/modal interpretation, against about 10% for finite declaratives” (p. 325). Granfeldt and Schlyter compare the French acquisition of 11 adult native speakers of Swedish to that of four bilingual (Swedish/French) subjects, focusing on subject/object clitics and definite articles. Their findings show that adult learners “interpret [subject clitics, object clitics, and definite articles] as non-clitics for an extended period … whereas the child acquirers interpret them early on as clitics” (p. 335).

The framework proposed by the volume (i.e., the study of the same functional categories across broad context divisions in order to bring researchers closer to understanding what facets are universal across populations) seems extraneously imposed on the chapters. The proposed contexts are so broad that they conflate such distinct contexts as adult versus child SLA and SLA in an immersion setting versus in a language classroom setting. The uneven coverage of the various functional categories and the heterogeneity of populations—some studies have dozens of respondents, whereas others have as few as two or even one—make generalizations across populations questionable. Even though the overall framework of the volume seems forced, the chapters are important contributions to SLA research in French.