The asymmetric acquisition hypothesis in the initial stages of child and adult L2 development of English

Abstract

The purpose of the current paper is to contribute to L2A research by exploring the age effects in the initial stages of L2 morphosyntactic development. It predominantly assumes the generative framework of grammar and language acquisition, where direct L2 child-adult comparison has been a neglected area of research, producing several theoretical assumptions, supported by rare and contradictory empirical work. In the current paper, the initial age effects are investigated in the light of learners’ morphosyntactic L2A. More specifically, the [± strong] Infl parameter of UG, V-raising in particular, is taken as the linguistic element of investigation, since it assigns different values in English [- strong] and in Macedonian [+ strong]. The participants in the experiment are a group of children (age 8-11) and a group of adults (age 20-60), all native speakers of Macedonian and beginners of L2 English. They were tested after a four-week exposure to specifically designed instruction on English V-raising. In the paper, it is argued that L2 children and adults share both similarities and qualitative differences in the early stages of L2A. The two age groups are similar in the syntactic L2 development, while they differ in the acquisition of inf‍lectional morphology on thematic verbs, where only L2 adults show considerable difficulties (supporting the Asymmetric Acquisition Hypothesis). They both seem to differ from children acquiring English as their mother tongue.