The acquisition of adverbs in child L3 French in Canada

Abstract

This paper1 focuses on the acquisition of adverbs in French L3 and aims to identify the possible role of transfer in this particular linguistic context. The data come from children born in Canada who speak Romanian as a heritage language and are exposed to English as the societal language as well as to French (L3) in school. The variable under scrutiny is the position of adverbs in light of Cinque’s (1999) universal hierarchy. The results indicate that children have nativelike competence for adverb placement in the three languages; however, some non-convergent uses arise in French signaling possible transfer of other parametric settings from Romanian. We suggest that this is a case of non-facilitative transfer due to structural similarity between Romanian and French.