Anke Lenzing

The development of the grammatical system in early second language acquisition : the multiple constraints hypothesis

Shortlisted for the Christopher Brumfit Award in Applied Linguistics. The Development of the Grammatical System in Early Second Language Acquisition focuses on the acquisition process of early L2 learners. It is based on the following key hypothesis: the initial mental grammatical system of L2 learners is constrained semantically, syntactically and mnemonically. This hypothesis is formalised as the Multiple Constraints Hypothesis . The empirical test of the Multiple Constraints Hypothesis is based on a large database including cross-sectional and longitudinal data from square-one ESL beginners. The study demonstrates that the postulated constraints are relaxed successively as learning progresses. The book is intended for postgraduate students as well as SLA researchers.

Transfer at the initial state

The role of L1 transfer in second language acquisition has been the focus of extensive research for decades (Gass 1988; Eubank 1993/1994; Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996; Pienemann 1998, Pienemann et al. 2005a, Pienemann 2011) with transfer at the initial state being of particular interest. Competing approaches have been pro-posed to address this issue: Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA) (Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996), partial transfer/full access (Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1996) minimal transfer/full access (Platzack 1996) and the Developmentally Moderated Transfer Hypothesis (DMTH) (Pienemann 1998, Pienemann et al. 2005a) to name some of the key approaches. The debate on the initial state includes the issue of access to the L1 grammatical system.