Abstract
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.
I am verygrateful to Angela Hahn and Andreas Hertl for helping me with the data collection and analysis. Special thanks go to Gisbert Fanselow for his invaluable criticism and comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Felix, S.W. (1988). UG-Generated Knowledge in Adult Second Language Acquisition. In: Flynn, S., O’Neil, W. (eds) Linguistic Theory in Second Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2733-9_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2733-9_15
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