This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on…

Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) argue that all speakers -- regardless of whether monolingual or bilingual -- have multiple grammars in their mental language representations. They further claim that this simple assumption can explain many things: optionality in second language (L2) language behaviour, multilingualism, language…

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal…

The study of native language influence in Second Language Acquisition has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This book, which includes 12 chapters by distinguished researchers in the field of second language acquisition, traces the conceptual history of language transfer from its early role within a Contrastive Analysis…