Learning modal force: Evidence from French

In English or French, modals express either possibility (e.g., “you can come”) or necessity (e.g., “you must come”). Prior acquisition studies have shown that English-speaking children master possibility modals early, but have difficulties with necessity modals, based on converging evidence from both comprehension experiments and corpus studies of children’s spontaneous productions. However, the underlying cause of this Necessity Gap remains debated. One issue is that prior studies have focused on English, a language in which necessity modals are much rarer than possibility modals in children’s input, which could participate in their later mastery. In this study, we test the hypothesis that children’s struggles with necessity modals are due to limited exposure by investigating how children learn modals in French, a language where necessity modals are more frequent in parental speech. We present a detailed corpus analysis of 2- to 6-year-old French children’s modal productions and their input as well as evidence from two experimental studies based on the corpus. We show that despite their higher exposure to necessity modals, French-speaking children experience the same difficulties as their English-speaking peers: They start producing necessity modals later, use them less frequently than possibility modals and, crucially, do not use them in an adult-like way. Additionally, we show that these difficulties persist up to the age of five. We conclude that the delay found in English learners cannot be explained by limited exposure and discuss various hypotheses to explain children’s struggles: conceptual, semantic, or pragmatic.