Four recent volumes on acquisition of French by different populations cover a range
of areas, particularly the development of verbal tense/agreement and nominal
gender/concord in first language (L1) acquirers, as opposed to second language (L2)
learners; the generalizability of grammatical deficits (e.g. difficulty acquiring
parametrized features different from the L1); and variation in acquisition between
functional features from different domains: nominal and verbal, for example, are not
all acquired at a comparable rate or with analogous errors across different learning
populations. The detailed data on acquisition of French presented in these studies
furnishes strong evidence for Universal Grammar (UG) systematicity that is not at
all predictable from input frequency alone.
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