Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Over the last decades language acquisition research has taught us to push the age at which various features of children's linguistic knowledge emerge back in time (cf.Höhle et el.2004, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996), and for some domains, such as prosody, this time travel does not have to stop at birth.It seems, however, that as far as language learnability in general is concerned, this readjustment of expectations concerning the age at which children come to grips with their first languages is not enough.The more closely we looked at second language learners, the more we realized that our ideas about what adults could or could not achieve both in terms of grammatical representation and performance called for some serious rethinking as well (cf.Hopp 2007 for a recent overview).It is becoming increasingly clear, then, that even though maturational schedules may well determine the emergence of specific linguistic subsystems, age affects language acquisition in many more ways, both positively in terms of experience, communicative skills and cognitive strategies (including transfer potential), and negatively as a consequence of cognitive aging (slowed-down processing, lack of inhibitory control, etc., cf.Bialystok et al. 2004).So even though we cannot deny that there are differences between L1 and (especially adult) L2 learners, it is far from clear what they are and to what extent they involve what one could consider universal constraints on linguistic knowledge systems.My commentary on the target paper by Jürgen Meisel focuses on five issues: (1) the question of whether the idea of an ersatz/surrogate solution (which Meisel refers to in his discussion in section 3.1.,paragraph 5) could solve the learnability problem if UG were no longer accessible to older L2 learners, (2) the certainly uncontested claim that learners need more than UG, (3) the status of structure dependency (as addressed in the paper), (4) evidence supporting the null hypothesis concerning both verb placement and subject-verb-agreement for children acquiring German as an early L2, and (5) what both child L2 and bilingual first language acquisition (2L1) can teach us about maturation and about L1 acquisition.
Author: Rosemarie Tracy
Institution: University of Mannheim
Language: German
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4231923958