Nature of Development in L2 Acquisition and Implications for Theories of Language Acquisition in General

The systematic and controlled study of adult second language (L2) acquisition within a Universal Grammar (UG) framework is important for both linguists and psychologists. Its study may not only inform us about adult L2 acquisition, a major feat of human learning which is little understood, but it may also inform us about the nature of first language (L1) acquisition and about the nature of the hypothesized language faculty. Results of this work may also yield new insights concerning the interaction of the language component with other domains of human cognition. This is all possible because the study of adult L2 acquisition, in contrast to the study of L1 acquisition, involves learners who have already reached mature states both in terms of their L1s and overall cognition. This means that patterns of development that emerge in adult language learning cannot be attributed to a lack of access to a full set of language principles nor can they be attributed to deficits in general cognitive development. Thus, if we find commonalities in patterns between L1 and L2 acquisition, these similarities could be argued to follow from a set of commonly shared language principles and they would also suggest that the essential language faculty argued to characterize L1 acquisition also holds in adult L2 acquisition. Stated in another way, comparable patterns in L1 and L2 acquistion could be argued to follow from properties that hold of the language learning faculty itself as an independent domain of human cognition.

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