The availability of universal grammar to adult and child learners - a study of the acquisition of German word order
- 1 December 1986
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Interlanguage studies bulletin (Utrecht)
- Vol. 2 (2) , 93-119
- https://doi.org/10.1177/026765838600200201
Abstract
Children learning German as their first language grasp its verb-final character from the very beginning. Adults learning German as a second language tend to assume in the beginning that it has a subject-verb-object order, and modify this hypothesis only gradually. We argue that this difference is due to the fact that children have access to the 'move alpha' matrix when learning the language, allowing them to make more abstract hypotheses, while adults can only rely on general learning strategies.Keywords
This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit:
- Verb Second Phenomena in Germanic LanguagesPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,1986
- On the Interaction of Root Transformations and Lexical Deletive RulesPublished by John Benjamins Publishing Company ,1983
- Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflectionsCognition, 1982
- THE ALTERNATION HYPOTHESIS: ACQUISITION OF DUTCH WORD ORDER BY TURKISH AND MOROCCAN FOREIGN WORKERS1Language Learning, 1981
- On determining developmental stages in natural second language acquisitionStudies in Second Language Acquisition, 1981
- THE SENSITIVE PERIOD FOR THE ACQUISITION OF SYNTAX IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 1Language Learning, 1980
- Age, Rate and Eventual Attainment in Second Language AcquisitionTESOL Quarterly, 1979
- Developing GrammarsPublished by Springer Nature ,1979
- IMPLICATIONAL PATTERNS IN INTERLANGUAGE SYNTAX VARIATIONLanguage Learning, 1977
- The Biological Foundations of LanguageHospital Practice, 1967