In order to clarify the relationship between cognitive development and linguistic development, French language comprehension tests originally administered to children learning French as a second language (Tremaine 1975) were given to intermediate‐level university students of French as a foreign language. Although there were similarities between the two groups' performances, the general finding was that a certain level of cognitive maturation was related to successful performance on items involving semantic‐syntactic relationships. Items involving inflectional/morphological distinctions, however, did not follow this pattern, and it is suggested that the acquisition of morphology may be more a function of specificexperience with a language than of level of cognitive matur