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The present study examines the respective roles of determiners and noun endings in four to ten-year-old French children's gender attribution choices. In the context of an elicited production task, participants were introduced with determiner-noun pairs where the gender form of the article and the probabilistic gender value of noun suffixes were discordant. Results showed that suffix-congruent choices were never above chance: they were far below chance in the case of feminine suffixes and either below or at chance in the case of masculine suffixes. Results are discussed with respect to a well-known phonological scenario for French gender acquisition and with respect to the masculine as default strategy recently put forth by Boloh and Ibernon (2010) .

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According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns' gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4-to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender attribution choices on natural gender, they did not base them on phonology either: the masculine was the dominant choice. These results thus provide additional support to the 'masculine as default' view of French nouns' gender acquisition proposed by the authors in an earlier study. The present article considers how the developmental conditions of children's initial computations might bias their tallies towards a higher type frequency for masculine nouns, which could contribute to launching this gender as the default.

As shown by Bowerman (1986), it has proved remarkably difficult to find clear-cut interpretations of why children face problems with conditionals. The present study reassesses a part of this puzzle by analysing four- to eight-year-old French children's acquisition of conditional verb forms. Relevant data in the literature and results of an experiment designed to gain information on the temporal meaning of young children's past conditional verb forms are presented and discussed. Among others, they are shown to provide weak support for interpretations stressing the role of conceptual problems and related mapping problems. Meeting one of Slobin's (1985) proposals, an interpretation is suggested that views the lateness of the past conditional verb form as due to an unexpected juxtaposition of ‘possibility’ and ‘non-possibility’ in its semantic representation. It is argued that such a juxtaposition cannot be achieved on the sole basis of cognitive development and that it requires the preliminary mastery of the conditional verb form.