This text comments on the Keynote article 'Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition' by Marit Westergaard, who argues for Full Transfer Potential within the Linguistic Proximity Model in third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary points at some theoretical and methodological issues related…

Researchers commonly estimate the prevalence of nativelikeness among second-language learners by assessing how many of them perform similarly to a sample of native speakers on one or several linguistic tasks. Even when the native (L1) samples and second-language (L2) samples are comparable in terms of age, socio-economic status, educational…

Applied linguistics may benefit from a morphological complexity measure to get a better grip on language learning problems and to better understand what kind of typological differences between languages are more important than others in facilitating or impeding adult learning of an additional language. Using speaking proficiency scores of 9,000…