In this commentary three aspects of the feature-based model that Lardiere assumes are discussed: the value of formalization in the investigation of second language acquisition, the extent to which native speakers converge on the same grammatical representations, and the length of time it takes to establish a mature native grammar. These factors…

Previous studies, including Duffield and Matsuo (2001; 2002; 2009), have demonstrated second language learners' overall sensitivity to a parallelism constraint governing English VP-ellipsis constructions: like native speakers (NS), advanced Dutch, Spanish and Japanese learners of English reliably prefer ellipsis clauses with structurally parallel…

This article presents a new set of experiments using the "sentence-matching paradigm" (Forster, 1979; Freedman and Forster, 1985; see also Bley-Vroman and Masterson, 1989), investigating native speakers' and second language (L2) learners' knowledge of constraints on clitic placement in French. Our purpose is three-fold: (1) to shed more light on…

Reports on an experiment investigating adult second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish object clitic placement by native speakers of English and French. Two experimental methodologies are compared: an on-line sentence matching task and an off-line grammaticality judgment task. (Author/VWL)