Evidence for syntactic competition in the acquisition of tense and agreement in child French

1 The proposal In many languages, children around the age of 2 make certain systematic errors in their verbal forms. They produce both non-finite root forms (NRFs) and finite forms in contexts where finite forms are required in the adult language. This is often referred to as the “optional infinitive (OI) stage” (Wexler 1994, 1998). For example, young children acquiring French as their native language produce sentences like (1a,b) where the verbal forms are non-finite and non-adult-like (e.g. infinitival ouvrir ‘to open’, and the past participle form assis ‘sat down’ instead of the adult forms j’ouvre ‘I (will) open’ and the compound past tense est assis ‘has sat down’ respectively.