How children build their morphosyntax: the case of French

Early morphosyntax is very rich and uniform in young French-speaking childr en. The present study aims to give a thorough analysis of the morphosyntax produced at the outset of multi-word speech, with a classification of free language produced at 2;0 by 27 French-speaking children. The corpus was ful ly tagged by an automatic part-of-speech tagger. A classification performed with words taken in isolation shows a clear difference between the categor ies used in single-word utterances and those used in multi-word utterances. A classification performed with word sequences reveals surprisingly adult- like sequences of syntactic categories and words; the non-adult combination s are few in a French child's language, The very successful use of the tagg er demonstrates the morphosyntactic coherence of the child's speech. When c ompared with adult language, the quantitative results, and more precisely t he data concerning regularity and error types, contribute to the documentat ion of all the specificities of the emerging morphosyntax in normally devel oping French children.