This study represents an attempt to describe the second-language competence of English-speaking children who are learning French as a second language. The performance of fourth- and sixth-grade children taking part in a French immersion program was compared to that of French-speaking children of the same age using an elicited imitation task. The subjects' performance on eight syntactic features was measured. French-speaking children, in general, performed better than the English children. A consistent pattern of errors by the English children indicated that they possessed a rule system for several of the features which was different from that of the child native speakers. By giving a digit span task in both languages, it was possible to rule out a confounding memory factor which may have offered an advantage to French speakers in a sentence-repetition task. (Author)