Sascha W. Felix

The accessibility of Universal Grammar in adult language learning

This paper investigates whether Universal Grammar (UG) is accessible to adult language learners. If adult acquirers have consistent access to intuitions of grammaticality in cases where the relevant constraints are underdetermined by the native language, this suggests that Universal Grammar continues to function in adult acquisition. Advanced Korean adult acquirers of English were given a test of grammaticality judgements on English wh-movement sentences, where the relevant constraints are thought to derive from principles of UG. Since Korean does not have syntactic wh-movement, correct intuitions cannot derive from native language transfer. Analysis of the results and comparison with native speaker results suggests a complex picture of the function of UG in adult language acquisition; however, clear UG effects were found.

More evidence on competing cognitive systems

This paper deals with the question of why adults, as a rule, fail to achieve native-speaker competence in a second language, whereas children appear to be generally able to acquire full command of either a first or second language. The Competition Model proposed in this paper accounts for this difference in terms of different cognitive systems or modules operating in child and adult language acquisition. It is argued that the childs learning process is guided by a language-specific module, roughly equivalent to Universal Grammar (cf. Chomsky, 1980), while adults tend to approach the learning task by utilizing a general problem-solving module which enters into competition with the language-specific system. The crucial evidence in support of the Competition Model comes from a) the availability of formal operations in different modules and b) from differences in the types of utterances produced by children and adults.

UG-Generated Knowledge in Adult Second Language Acquisition

One of the fundamental problems that has received much controversial discussion in second language acquisition research concerns the question of whether or not the process of learning a second language (L2) is guided and controlled by the same “natural” principles that appear to operate in first language (L1) acquisition (Dulay and BUrt. 1974; Dulay. Burt, and Krashen. 1982; Eckman, 1977; Felix, 1982; Rutherford. 1982; Wode, 1982; and contributors to this volume). It seems to me that the answer to this question depends to a large extent on what is meant by “natural principle.” While L2 acquisition research has discovered quite an impressive number of structural regularities which appear to occur also in L1 acquisition, the theoretical status of such regularities and the nature of their underlying principles is in many cases rather unclear. In other words, it is still an open question what exactly these regularities and principles reflect in terms of the cognitive structures and mechanisms involved in language acquisition. As a consequence, there have been many competing proposals in the literature which attempt to give alternative explanations for the observed regularities in terms of processing strategies, psychological variables, discourse strategies, markedness theory, etc.

Universal Grammar in the classroom: the effects of formal instruction on second language acquisition

One of the dominating issues in recent second language acquisition research has been the question of whether or not L2 learners have access to principles of Universal Grammar. It seems that currently there is fairly strong evidence both for and against UG-access by L2 learners. Consequently, the question arises what kinds of factors may potentially further or block UG-access and whether such factors can be related to certain properties of the learning environment. In this paper we wish to approach this question by looking at a somewhat extreme learning situation, namely the acquisition (or maybe non-acquisition) of English as a second language by 77 German high school students who learned and were exposed to English exclusively during classroom hours. These students were tested for their ability to correctly judge grammaticality contrasts in English that are standardly attributed to UG principles. The results suggest that - even under a most liberal interpretation - these students did not show any evidence of having UG-access. Rather, they utilized a number of strategies that (a) tied them very tightly to properties of German and (b) prevented them from making any generalizations that went beyond what had been explicitly taught in the classroom.

On the (in)applicability of Piagetian thought to language learning

In recent years research on language acquisition (both L1 and L2) has gradually turned away from the domain of pure description towards dealing with problems of explanation. Most students of language development feel that it is somewhat insufficient to merely state the linguistic regularities and verbal strategies that according to the available production data appear to govern processes of language learning; rather, it seems desirable that the regularities observable in the learners verbal behavior over time be in some way explained . Frequently, the term explanation is—implicitly rather than explicitly—understood as an attempt to reduce the specific linguistic regularities found in language learning processes to a set of some more general (i.e. non-linguistic) principles that will not only control other learning tasks as well, but will also govern mans mental activities as such (Slobin 1973, Schlesinger 1977, Larsen-Freeman 1976, Bever 1970, Wong-Fillmore 1976). Among those mental domains which appear to provide principles general enough to be applicable to problems of language, learning cognition or rather cognitive development turned out to be the most promising. As a consequence, a large number of studies focused on the attempt to explain formal linguistic properties of language learning processes in terms of more general regularities in mans cognitive abilities as they develop (Seliger 1980, Gass 1980, Felix 1976, Sinclair-de-Zwart 1973, Meisel 1979, Clahsen 1979). In fact, the term explanation frequently means little more than reducing language acquisition to aspects of cognitive development.