Background: Research on the grammatical characteristics of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across languages has challenged accounts about the nature of DLD. Studies of the characteristics of DLD in different languages can reveal which components of DLD emerge irrespective of language and which components are language specific.…

This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…

This paper looks into the dilemma of what counts as a grammatical 'learner error' in ELT on the basis of recent results from English variationist research and English as a lingua franca research. Examples from these studies show that features often perceived as 'errors' for EFL speakers also occur in ESL production--where they are called…

English ditransitive verbs show a complex alternation between the double object construction (DOC, (1)) and prepositional object datives (POD, (2)). This dissertation examines the acquisition, representation, and learnability of the dative alternation among L2 English learners, presenting experimental data from participants with L1 backgrounds of…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

This paper intends to provide an Optimality-theoretic analysis of word-stress learnability among Moroccan learners of English. Language acquisition, from an Optimality Theory perspective, is a process of reordering the constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. To account for stress…

This paper presents an experimental study of the rarely explored question of how input through instruction interacts with L2 acquisition at the level of modular linguistic knowledge. The investigation focuses on L2 knowledge of the English polarity item "any," whose properties are only partially covered by typical language-teaching…

The chapters in this volume, all written by experts in the field, present an array of new research on second language acquisition (SLA) that touches on several current theoretical debates in the field and present a rich range of new empirical data and a number of innovative findings. The studies address questions relating to ultimate attainment,…

This corpus study brings a second language (L2) research perspective, insights from generative grammar, and new empirical evidence to bear on a long-accepted claim in the World Englishes literature--namely, that inversion with "wh"-movement in colloquial Indian English is obligatory in embedded clauses and impossible in main clauses. It…

According to generative linguistic theory, certain principles underlying language structure are innately given, accounting for how children are able to acquire their mother tongues (L1s) despite a mismatch between the linguistic input and the complex unconscious mental representation of language that children achieve. This innate structure is…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

Research over the last decades has shown that language development in its multiple forms is characterized by a succession of stable and unstable states. However, the variation observed is neither expected nor can it be accounted for on the basis of traditional learning concepts conceived of within the Universal Grammar (UG) paradigm. In this…

Compares models of Optimality Theory (OT) and Variable Rules (VR), arguing that VR is superior on theoretical and empirical grounds: constraint effects are stable, transparent, learnable. Moreover, VR's probabilistic treatment of constraint effects allows successful modeling of cases in which multiple violations of a single constraint lead to…

Examines crosslinguistic variation in "filler-gap dependencies" (wh-questions and relative clauses) from a processing perspective, and integrates research findings from psycholinguistics, language typology, and generative grammar. Numerous implicational universals and hierarchies are proposed that receive a natural explanation in terms…

Examined the syntactic behavior of wh-operators in Kenyang, a Bantu language. Following Chomsky's minimalist programme (1993, 1995), describes the nature of universal grammar and accounts for certain specific parametrized variations of that system into the nature of interrogative structures in Kenyang. (Author/VWL)