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Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: We explored the advantage of bilingualism and the effect of linguistic proximity on the acquisition of determiner-noun agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology, in a French immersion setting. To our knowledge, third language acquisition literature has yet to provide evidence of a bilingual advantage in learning a particular feature of morphology in an additional language among young children. Design/methodology/approach: We compared accuracy in determiner-noun agreement on a narrative task in three groups of grade 1 and 2 students ( n = 15 in each group): a group of third language French learners whose first language marked gender, a group of third language French learners whose first language did not mark gender, and a group of English learners learning French as a second language. Data and analysis: If the determiner and the noun agreed in gender, gender on the determiner was considered correct. A repeated measures factorial ANCOVA was carried out to compare the performance among the three language groups on the proportion of correctly marked masculine and feminine nouns. Findings/conclusions: All of the children achieved high levels of accuracy on masculine nouns with no difference among the three language groups on the proportion of correctly marked masculine nouns. There was a significant difference in the proportion of correctly marked feminine nouns in favour of the group whose first language marks gender compared to the other two groups. Originality: The current study supports transfer in the domain of morphology among primary-school-aged children (who are first language speakers of diverse minority languages) in the early stages of third-language French acquisition. Significance/implications: This finding provides preliminary evidence of a bilingual advantage in the domain of morphology among young, emergent trilinguals whose first language and third language share gender marking as a linguistic feature, supporting the linguistic proximity model.

This study examined overlap and correlates of poor reading comprehension in English and French for children in early French immersion. Poor comprehenders were identified in grade 3 in English and French using a regression method to predict reading comprehension scores from age, non-verbal reasoning, word reading accuracy, and word reading fluency. Three groups of poor comprehenders were identified: 10 poor comprehenders in English and French, 11 poor comprehenders in English, and 10 poor comprehenders in French, and compared to 10 controls with good reading comprehension in both English and French. There was a moderate degree of overlap in comprehension difficulties in English and French among poor comprehenders with equivalent amounts of exposure to French, with a prevalence rate of 41.7% in our sample. Children who were poor comprehenders in both English and French consistently scored the lowest on English vocabulary in grade 1 and grade 3 and in French vocabulary in grade 3 suggesting that poor comprehenders' vocabulary weaknesses in English as a primary language may contribute to comprehension difficulties in English and French.