Abstract
The acquisition of French by two six‐year old boys, native speakers of English, was observed longitudinally. Form‐meaning relations in their spontaneous multi‐word utterances were compared to the form‐meaning relations observed, in previous research, in the speech of two‐year old English L1 and French L1 children, at a similar level of linguistic development. The same fairly limited set of form‐meaning relations accounted for the majority of both L1 and L2 learners' utterances over the period of the longitudinal observations. However, in the speech of the L1 learners, a sequence of emergence of relations or groups of relations had been observed whereas, for L2 learners, no clear developmental sequence was apparent. This difference was seen as a reflection of the fact that L1 learners' linguistic development is closely tied to cognitive development. L2 learners, cognitively more mature, encoded a greater variety of meanings even when their knowledge of the language was extremely limited. They achieved this variety by the use of pro‐forms whose meanings they over‐extended.
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