Property-by-property acquisition of a second language: What transfers, under what conditions, and how does recovery from transfer proceed?

Abstract

This commentary discusses the recent keynote article in Second Language Research by Westergaard (2021), which extends the Micro-cue Model to second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary comments on such questions as: What makes a given property easy or hard to acquire? How do learners determine similarity? What exactly is the role of UG, on a non-parametric view? And what explains the differences between L1 and L2/subsequent acquisition?