This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as "Tigers have stripes" and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as "All tigers have…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

Interlanguage has been the main development of field research on second language acquisition (SLA). According to Richard et al (1996) Interlanguage is one of the kinds of language that can be produced by second language learners in the process of acquiring or learning a new language. The influence of the universal grammar of the first language in…

Four recent volumes on acquisition of French by different populations cover a range of areas, particularly the development of verbal tense/agreement and nominal gender/concord in first language (L1) acquirers, as opposed to second language (L2) learners; the generalizability of grammatical deficits (e.g. difficulty acquiring parametrized features…

Discusses the theory that the second-language processing of subordinate clauses and of anaphora is affected by the basic word order of a learners native language. This phenomenon, believed to be a prediction of universal grammar, is explored. (54 references) (Author/VWL)

This paper examines two- to five-year-old children's knowledge of inversion in English yes/no questions through a new experimental study. It challenges the view that the syntax for inversion develops slowly in child English and tests the hypothesis that grammatical competence for inversion is present from the earliest testable ages of the child's…

The "state of the art" in the three fields of contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage is critically examined from the point of view of evolving an explanatory theory of a second language learner's performance. Each field is discussed with respect to its outreach, theoretical assumptions, methodology, claims and empirical…

Discusses the results of an error analysis of 100 English compositions written by university students in Iran. It is suggested that mistakes are not primarily due to interference from the native language, but to developmental errors, similar to errors made in first language acquisition. (Author/AMH)