| Summary: | Recent research (e.g., Amaro et al. 2012) acknowledges that the study of third language acquisition cannot simply be viewed as an additive extension of bilingualism, or be assimilated to second language acquisition. But empirical research focusing specifically on L3 acquisition is still in its infancy and many questions need to be addressed. This thesis will thus study the unique properties that may characterize L3 acquisition from a morpho-syntactic perspective. More specifically, it focuses on the Verb Movement Parameter. According to Pollock (1989, 1997), English differs from French and Spanish regarding the placement of negative elements, adverbs, and inverted questions with negative pronouns. If L2/L3 learners successfully acquire the appropriate setting of the verb-movement parameter, they will be able to produce wellformed sentences in French despite having a limited connaissance of the language. This parameter will allow us to describe the level of competence of a bilingual (Spanish-English) L3 learner of French, as well as determine the amount of positive transfer from Spanish to French in the initial state of the language acquisition. Written data will be collected by administering a variety of elicitation tasks (e.g., grammaticality judgment task, preference task, guided production task).
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