This article examines epistemic language production of unilingual French children (n = 6, Paris Corpus, Morgenstern & Parisse, 2012) and their mother’s (input). Adopting a strongly syntactic approach, it focusses on epistemic usages of modal verbs (pouvoir, devoir) and a few adverbs (peut-être (que)), which are compared to results of previous studies on English and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS). Our corpus study shows that francophone children exhibit an order of acquisition which is identical to what is found in English and BCS: for modals, root interpretations are produced before epistemic ones, and for epistemic language, adverbs come before modals (see also Bassano 1996). We hypothesize that these results may be explained, at least partially, by the existing link between acquisition orders and syntactic complexity. This study contributes to the understanding of language acquisition processes that allow children to map epistemic thoughts to linguistic forms.