Schlücker (2019) points out the commonalities and differences between compounds as word-formation units and syntactically formed multi-word expressions in a wide set of European languages. In spite of the formal differences, both patterns may serve the same purpose and even enter into competition to do so (e.g. Dutch wetenschapsbeleid ‘science policy’ vs wetenschappelijk beleid ‘scientific policy’ (Booij 2019: 105)). However, even within a same genealogical family, languages may significantly vary with respect to their degree of analyticity, as has been argued in the “Germanic Sandwich†and “Romance Sandwich†hypotheses (e.g. van Haeringen 1956, Lamiroy 2011). The cross-linguistic differences in degree of analyticity between French (more analytic) and Dutch (more synthetic) are also perceivable in the field of compounding. Van Goethem (2009) and Van Goethem & Amiot (2019) have demonstrated that Dutch has a much stronger tendency towards compounding than French (e.g. Du. badkamer vs Fr. salle de bains ‘bathroom’). In line with Fradin (2009), we adopt a restrictive approach of compounding in which the presence of prepositions and/or internal inflection in multi-word expressions is considered evidence for their syntactic formation. The example above illustrates that Dutch compounding differs from French in another important aspect: while Germanic compounding is by definition right-headed, French has a general tendency towards left-hand headed compounds and phrases. In this study, we investigate the impact of these typological differences on the acquisition of Dutch nominal compounds by French-speaking learners in the context of multilingual Belgium. The aims of the study are threefold: (i) to provide a corpus analysis of the acquisition of Dutch compounds at different levels of abstraction (schematic and substantive compound constructions); (ii) to investigate the impact of additional target-language input through CLIL programs (Content and Language Integrated Learning) on the acquisition of ...