ABSTRACT
This chapter determines whether the problems that French SLI children encounter with gender agreement morphology are the result of a representational deficit located in the computational component of the grammar (narrow syntax) or whether they are to be accounted for as the result of a production (interface) deficit. During the past 15 years a considerable number of psycholinguistic studies have been concerned with agreement processing. For the past 15 years, two main lines of research have been followed to explain children's inconsistent use of grammatical morphology: the syntactic approach and the processing approach. Ongoing research may allow us to determine whether this conclusion can be maintained when other (intrinsic or optional) nominal f-features such as number and person are at stake. The existence of a striking dissociation between preserved recognition and processing of f-features on the receptive side and impairment on morphological marking and determiner occurrence on the production side constitutes the main finding of the present study.
