The acquisition of adverbs in trilingual children: does transfer play any role?

In this paper, we focus on the acquisition of adverbs in order to identify the role of transfer in the context of trilingual language acquisition. The trilingual data for our study comes from children born in Canada who have Romanian as heritage language and are exposed to French in school and to English as the societal language. As these children are of school age, our study provides important insights since trilingualism in children is less studied. The variable under scrutiny is the position of adverbs that conform to Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy in the adult grammar of each language. The results indicate that children have adult competence for adverb placement in all three languages. However, some errors arise in French signaling transfer of parametric settings from Romanian. We conclude that this is a non-facilitative transfer justified by the typological proximity in parametric settings between Romanian and French.