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This provocative article raises many important issues that need to be addressed and in so doing will advance the fields of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition in several important ways. Fundamental questions concerning multilingual development persist especially with respect to the role of Universal Grammar in this language learning process. This response article has a dual role: It first outlines those areas of agreement with the proposals made in this article and, second, it discusses those areas of the proposed model that need to be confronted in order to have the model evaluated as a fully viable one.

Westergaard’s microcue account raises the question of the exact nature of language transfer in the acquisition of languages as well of how L1/Ln input interacts with the principles of universal grammar (UG) during processing. In order to consider in more detail the actual representation building, processing mechanisms that would be involved, her approach will be spelled out in terms of the Modular Cognition Framework (see Sharwood Smith, 2017; Sharwood Smith and Truscott, 2014; Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2004, 2019). As well as identifying the way in which microcues would be constructed, this analysis in particular will have the effect of undermining the concept underlying the transfer metaphor as a way of characterizing crosslinguistic influence.

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying syntactic structures can give rise to disparities in meaning in particular contexts. In short, analogy falls short of explaining both adult knowledge of language and children’s syntactic development.

Accepted manuscript. Final version published in Second Language Research, is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658319884116. In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on crosslinguistic influence in L2/Ln acquisition, I first briefly outline the Micro-cue Model of L1 acquisition (Westergaard, 2009a, 2014), arguing that children build their I-language grammars incrementally, paying attention to small distinctions in syntax and information structure from early on. They are also shown to be conservative learners, generally not producing overt elements or performing movement operations unless there is positive evidence for this in the input, thus minimizing the need for unlearning. I then ask the question how this model fares with respect to multilingual situations, more specifically L2 and L3 acquisition. Discussing both theoretical and empirical evidence, I argue that, although L2 and L3 learners are different from L1 children in that they are not always conservative learners, they are also sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, in that transfer/crosslinguistic influence takes place on a property-by-property basis. Full Transfer is traditionally understood as wholesale transfer at the initial state of L2 acquisition. However, I argue that it is impossible to distinguish between wholesale and property-by-property transfer in L2 acquisition on empirical grounds. In L3 acquisition, on the other hand, crosslinguistic influence from both previously acquired languages would provide support for property-by-property transfer. I discuss a few such cases and argue for what I call Full Transfer Potential (FTP), rather than Full (wholesale) Transfer, within the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) of L3 acquisition. Thus, rather than assuming that ‘everything does transfer’, I argue that ‘anything may transfer’.

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb object) languages. It is possible then that the mind is more likely to expect case marking when confronted with a language with SOV word order but not necessarily so if the language has SVO word order. We tested this hypothesis with 54 naive learners of Latin with English as a first language (L1). The participants were divided into two groups. One received a 100-word input treatment in Latin that contained only simple SOV sentences, and the other received the same input treatment except that the word order of the treatment sentences was SVO. After the treatment, a surprise self-paced reading test that contained grammatical and ungrammatical case-marked sentences was administered. Participants read test items that matched the word order of the treatment they received (i.e. SOV learners read SOV sentences, and SVO learners read SOV sentences). Results showed a significant slowing down on ungrammatical sentences for the SOV group but not for the SVO group. However, on a test of basic sentence comprehension in which case marking was the cue to determine who did what to whom, we found no distinction between the groups. We discuss these findings in light of how typological universals work in languages and what they could mean for language acquisition.

Do properties of individual languages shape the mechanisms by which they are processed? By virtue of their non-concatenative morphological structure, the recognition of complex words in Semitic languages has been argued to rely strongly on morphological information and on decomposition into root and pattern constituents. Here, we report results from a masked priming experiment in Hebrew in which we contrasted verb forms belonging to two morphological classes, Paal and Piel, which display similar properties, but crucially differ on whether they are extended to novel verbs. Verbs from the open-class Piel elicited familiar root priming effects, but verbs from the closed-class Paal did not. Our findings indicate that, similarly to other (e.g., Indo-European) languages, down-to-the-root decomposition in Hebrew does not apply to stems of non-productive verbal classes. We conclude that the Semitic word processor is less unique than previously thought: Although it operates on morphological units that are combined in a non-linear way, it engages the same universal mechanisms of storage and computation as those seen in other languages.

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This hypothesis is tested in two experiments, one comparing Korean and Mandarin speakers in their L2 (English) and the other investigating count/mass morphosyntax in native Korean and Mandarin Chinese. In both experiments, participants are tested on their suppliance of plural marking with count and mass NPs. The findings are fully consistent with the view of atomicity as a semantic universal: learners overuse plural marking with mass atomic nouns such as furniture more than with mass non-atomic nouns such as water. Even though plural marking is associated with atomicity in Korean but not in Mandarin, the same patterns are observed in L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners. We conclude that learners’ performance is not due to L1-transfer, but rather to the role of the semantic universal of atomicity in L2-acquisition.

Why do humans drink and drive but fail to rdink and rdive? Here, I suggest that these regularities could reflect abstract phonological principles that are active in the minds and brains of all speakers. In support of this hypothesis, I show that (a) people converge on the same phonological preferences (e.g., dra over rda) even when the relevant structures (e.g., dra, rda) are unattested in their language and that (b) such behavior is inexplicable by purely sensorimotor pressures or experience with similar syllables. Further support for the distinction between phonology and the sensorimotor system is presented by their dissociation in dyslexia, on the one hand, and the transfer of phonological knowledge from speech to sign, on the other. A detailed analysis of the phonological system can elucidate the functional architecture of the typical mind/brain and the etiology of speech and language disorders.

A significant body of theoretically motivated research has addressed the role of Universal Grammar (UG) in the nonnative acquisition of morphosyntax and properties of the syntax–semantics interface, but very little research has addressed the role of phonological principles of UG in nonnative language acquisition. Turkish has a regular and pervasive system of vowel harmony for which classroom second language (L2) learners receive explicit instruction and abundant input; however, there are also cases of non-canonical vowel harmony in Turkish, for which classroom learners receive no instruction and rather little input. In this study, we show that English–Turkish L2ers come to exhibit sensitivity to the ‘No Crossing Constraint’ of UG (Goldsmith, 1976; Hammond, 1988) when calculating non-canonical vowel harmony in the context of underlyingly pre-specified non-velarized laterals (i.e. ‘light’ [l]), despite the poverty of the stimulus and potentially misleading effects of classroom instruction and standard Turkish orthography. We argue that this supports the view that nonnative phonological development is guided by (at least one principle of) UG.

The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote field-based situations, where the majority of the world’s languages are spoken and acquired, poses challenges for best-practice methodologies assumed in lab-based FLA research. This article discusses the challenges of child language acquisition research in fieldwork contexts with lesser-known, under-described languages with small communities of speakers. The authors suggest some modified approaches to methodology for child language research appropriate to challenging fieldwork situations, in the hope of encouraging more cross-linguistic acquisition research.

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal is based on the idea that any human grammar readily accommodates sets of rules in sub-grammars that can seem (apparently) contradictory. We discuss the rationale behind this proposal and establish a dialogue with recent research in SLA, multilingualism, L3 acquisition, and L2 processing. We compare the Multiple Grammars explanation to optionality in L2 to other current proposals, and provide experimental results that can demonstrate the existence of active sub-grammars in the linguistic representation of L2 speakers.

This article clarifies some ideas presented in this issue’s keynote article (Amaral and Roeper, this issue) and discusses several issues raised by the contributors’ comments on the nature of the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory. One of the key goals of the article is to unequivocally state that MG is not a parametric theory and that its current version follows very explicit minimalist assumptions. We also refine the notion of ‘minimal multiple rules’ to make their theoretical status more precise. Overall, we would like to acknowledge the important contribution of all the articles in this issue to the evolution of the theory.

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There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax—semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It is argued that there is a functional hierarchy of modifiers in the domain of adpositions, which enables the linguistic elaboration of trajectories, but that not all languages lexicalize all types. This study examines whether L2 learners of English are able to overcome the poverty of the stimulus and recruit the relevant functional categories despite their absence in the first language (L1). Modifiers were taught to learners individually, but never in combination. A computer-animated narrative was designed in order to create felicitous contexts for combinations of modifiers, and preference and grammaticality judgment tasks were administered to 121 students from various L1 backgrounds, as well as 20 native speakers. Accuracy scores were remarkably targetlike on binary combinations of modifiers (1) across proficiency levels, (2) across L1s, and (3) across the two tasks, revealing that with the semantics of modifiers in place, the syntactic hierarchy is naturally manifested.

Seeing the logical problem of second language acquisition as that of primarily selecting and re-assembling bundles of features anew, Lardiere proposes to dispense with the deductive learning approach and its broad range of consequences subsumed under the concept of parameters. While we agree that feature assembly captures more precisely the complexity of the form—meaning mapping task in second language acquisition, we disagree with the dismissal of a parametric approach. We argue instead that the notion of parameter is not incompatible with feature assembly, if parameters and features are understood in a particular way.

This special issue focuses on evidence bearing on the specific ways in which linguistic differences across languages may affect what is learned early (or late) in language and to what extent language-specific structures interact with cognition. The ultimate question is whether or not development follows a universal course or is influenced by the linguistic system being acquired. Of particular interest in the linguistic realm are data exploring what governs the late development of linguistic forms; of particular interest in the cognitive realm are areas for which crosslinguistic data reveal linguistic influences on the timing of development of cognitive concepts or on attentional patterns in children. The combined research suggests that the morphosyntactic structure of the language, the semantic notions encoded in the language and the cognitive underpinnings related to those structures all play a role in the course of development.

Researchers who assume that Universal Grammar (UG) plays a role in second language (L2) acquisition are still debating whether L2 learners have access to UG in its entirety (the Full Access hypothesis; e.g. Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994; 1996; White, 1989; 2003) or only to those aspects of UG that are instantiated in their first language (L1) grammar (the No Parameter Resetting hypothesis; e.g. Hawkins and Chan, 1997). The Full Access hypothesis predicts that parameter resetting will be possible where the L1 and L2 differ in parameter values, whereas the No Parameter Resetting hypothesis predicts that parameter resetting will not be possible. These hypotheses are tested in a study examining whether English-speaking learners of Afrikaans can reset the Split-IP parameter (SIP) (Thráinsson, 1996) and the V2 parameter from their L1 ([-SIP], [-V2]) to their L2 ([+SIP], [+V2]) values. 15 advanced English learners of Afrikaans and 10 native speakers of Afrikaans completed three tasks: a sentence manipulation task, a grammaticality judgement task and a truth-value judgement task. Results suggest that the interlanguage grammars of the L2 learners are [+SIP] and [+V2] (unlike the L1), providing evidence for the Full Access hypothesis.

With emotion terms as a between-participants variable, 304 American and Korean undergraduates free associated in writing for 1 minute to either anger, envy, fear, jealousy, or sadness. In favor of the concept of language universals but in opposition to the tenet of postmodernism that emotion concepts are language and culture specific, a third of the associations were identical in the two languages, with differences centered on what aspect of the emotion guided the associations: identification of synonyms, consequences, correlates, or elicitors of the emotions. The association overlap between envy and jealousy was similar for Americans and Koreans. Contrary to prototype theory, the jealousy associations did not overlap more with the anger, fear, and sadness associations than the overlaps among the latter emotion terms.

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second language acquisition. As stated in the Introduction, the idea of Multiple Grammars (MG) is in some sense obvious in the context of second language acquisition and, in my opinion, it also accounts well for the increasing number of findings from psycholinguistic studies that the first language (L1) continues to affect the second language (L2) even at very advanced stages of acquisition. I am also very sympathetic to the Full Transfer / Full Access approach and the goal of dealing with apparent optionality in terms of more formal representations and testable predictions. In this commentary, I focus on some aspects of the theory that are left somewhat unclear. The issues that I address are the nature of complexity and the ‘size’ of rules as well as the question of what constitutes conflicting (sub-)grammars. I also compare the MG theory to my own model of microcues (Westergaard, 2009a, 2009b), discussing some similarities and differences, the latter mainly due to the micro-cue model claiming that the rules of early child language are smaller and more specific than has previously been assumed.

This study addresses the issue of second language (L2) epistemology assuming Chomsky’s (1995) discussion of the place of Universal Grammar (UG) in mental design: i.e., the optimal solution to the mental design problem for language in the sense of Minimalist theory. Aspects of interpretation of continuous and discontinuous interrogatives of the form qui de AP (‘who (of) AP’) in first language and L2 acquisition appear to follow from principles of economy in mental design and language-dependent hypotheses. We argue that such knowledge is guaranteed to arise in the absence of relevant input only if a grammar is a realization of language-dependent hypotheses and basic principles of grammar, but crucially not if it consists of a set of (derivative) grammatical theorems not constrained by principles of optimal design.

This paper investigates the knowledge of multiple wh-questions such as Who ate what? by high-proficiency non-native speakers of English whose first language is Japanese. Japanese grammar is known to license a wider range of such questions than English – who came why, for example – although the precise theoretical account is not yet clear. Acceptability judgements were obtained on 6 different types of such questions. Acceptability of English examples was rated by native speakers of English, Japanese examples were judged by native speakers of Japanese, and the English examples were judged by high-proficiency Japanese speakers of English. The results for native speakers judging their own language were generally in accord with expectations. The high-level non-native speakers of English were significantly different from native speakers in their ratings of these sentences. However, the ratings were clearly not simply the result of transfer. The consequences of this finding for theories of Universal Grammar (UG) in second language acquisition (SLA) are discussed.

The goal of this article is to present a detailed study of the second language acquisition (SLA) of English aspect by native speakers of Slavic languages. A parameterized distinction between English and Slavic aspect accounts for the subtle differences between English and Slavic telic and atelic sentences. Based on a syntax-theoretical treatment of aspect, the article investigates the process of SLA of aspect in Slavic speakers at three levels of proficiency in English: low intermediate, high intermediate and advanced. Second language (L2) learners are found to be capable of resetting the aspectual parameter value to the English setting, thus successfully acquiring a property of language almost never taught in language classrooms. The article also studies the acquisition of a cluster of constructions, which syntactic research relates to the English value of the aspectual parameter, and which have been found to appear together in the speech of English children (Snyder and Stromswold, 1997): double objects, verb–particles and resultatives. Results indicate that each of these constructions forms part of this aspect-related cluster and that knowledge of aspect and knowledge of the cluster co-occur. The results of the experimental study bring new evidence to bear on the theoretical choice between direct access to the L2 value (Epstein et al., 1996; Flynn, 1996) or starting out the process of acquisition with the L1 value of a parameter (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994;1996),supporting the latter view.

Twenty-seven English-speaking learners of Chinese (the experimental groups) and 20 native speakers of Chinese (the control group) participated in a study that investigated second language learners' knowledge of reconstruction (NP and predicate fronted sentences with ziji ‘self’) in Chinese. Results of a sentence interpretation task indicate that English-speaking learners of Chinese had knowledge of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji inside a moved predicate, and lack of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji inside a moved NP, although such information is not directly available in English. While the experiment produced evidence that they appeared to have access to Universal Grammar, English-speaking learners of Chinese bound ziji in non-movement sentences to an embedded subject, indicating that they mapped the narrower setting of reflexives in English onto a wider parameter setting of ziji in Chinese.

An article in the last Second Language Research (Kanno, 1998) describes studies in which American adult learners of Japanese in Hawai’i are tested for their knowledge of two UG principles: the Empty Category Principle and the Overt Pronoun Constraint.Kanno shows that native-like knowledge on the part of a learner of the workings of the one principle will not necessarily guarantee that the same individual will have knowledge of the other principle at the same point in time. Therefore, learners are not ‘laterally consistent’. Furthermore, where learners do demonstrate knowledge of a principle at Time 1, they may not do so at Time 2. Thus, says Kanno, there is also a problem of ‘longitudinal consistency’.However, in our comment on Kanno’s paper, we suggest that another form of ‘lateral inconsistency’, which arises from a failure to replicate Kanno’s findings for the ECP in another population of adult learners, constitutes a further muddying of the waters in the UG accessibility debate.

This article proposes that L2 learners differ from native speakers with respect to two benchmarks–the extent to which native-like success on one principle of UG predicts comparable success on other principles (lateral consistency), and the extent to which this level of success is stable over time (longitudinal). Results of two experimental studies on the acquisition of Japanese as a second language show that L2 learners exhibit neither lateral nor longitudinal consistency with respect to UG, at least in the early stages of the acquisition process.

In this article I report on an experimental study of the acquisition of English reflexives by adult Japanese-speaking learners of English. I argue that, consonant with a review of previous studies on binding in second language (L2) acquisition, the results of my experiment yield no evidence of an interlanguage grammar that is illicit with respect to Universal Grammar (UG).Moreover, I argue that a particular asymmetry in the nonlocal binding of English reflexives exhibited by the learners in this study is underdetermined with respect to both the L2 English input and learners' L1 Japanese competence in such a way as to suggest that these learners had direct access to Condition A of UG binding theory.

This longitudinal experimental study is concerned with the L2 acquisition of argument structure and its relationship with Case Theory. French ( n = 17) and English ( n = 19) intermediate learners of Spanish as a Second Language were tested three times over a period of eight months on their knowledge of dative experiencers. Eighteen Spanish native speakers acted as a control group. Dative experiencers in Spanish are common with a subset of psych verbs and unaccusative predicates. These experiencers look like indirect objects on the surface, and indeed can appear in the position of indirect objects. Most of the time, however, they appear in canonical subject position and behave like subjects for some modules of the grammar, such as Control PRO in adjunct clauses. It was hypothesized that if a thematic hierarchy is operative in SLA,both English and French learners would have no difficulty interpreting experiencers as subjects, but that English learners would experience greater difficulty with dative case because there is no dative case in English.An Interpretation Task and a Preference Task were designed to test these hypotheses. Results indicate that,whereas both groups of subjects have access to the thematic hierarchy (a UG component),L1 influence plays an important role with case assignment and checking.

There is an enduring debate concerning the degree to which linguis tic phenomena are culturally specific or universal. We review evi dence that suggests that many linguistic processes are cross-culturally common and likely to be a function of human physiology, but we also acknowledge strong evidence for particularistic linguistic phe nomena relating to content and communication context. In support of our position, we examine subject responses to semantic relations in nine different cultures. Consistent with cognitive theories, we find a pronounced pattern of cross-cultural agreement concerning the manner in which antonyms are employed. In an effort to assess the interaction between judgments of semantic relations and the cul tural context of subjects, we have conducted a detailed analysis of the responses of Kelantan, Malay, subjects to a set of 15 semantic relations. The results continue to support an argument for the universality of antonymic meaning.

This study explores the ability of Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to comprehend metaphorical expressions in English and investigates whether the use of their first language (L1) conceptual and linguistic knowledge may facilitate the comprehension of these expressions. For this purpose, the study adopts a contrastive model developed by Charteris-Black, which consists of six types of metaphor to compare and contrast in both English and Arabic. On the basis of this model, the researcher designed a multiple-choice test to assess the participants’ recognition of English metaphorical expressions. The results reveal that the participants’ receptive knowledge of metaphors varied on the basis of the six types of metaphor. The study provides evidence of the possibility that EFL learners display general conceptualizing capacity regardless of their language, which hints, possibly, at the potential universality of conceptual metaphor. It also proposes some pedagogical implications that may assist EFL learners in acquiring metaphorical expressions in English.

Universal Grammar (UG), as it is conceived in the current principles and parameters approach to grammatical theory, may be said to contain certain default parameter values which are already in place at birth. If this is the case, then any languages which eventually show marked parameter values will necessarily involve a change in parameter settings during the L1 acquisition sequence. An indication of such a change can be signalled by a pattern of late acquisition of some feature. We will here argue that the correct placement of sentential negation with respect to modal auxiliaries in Swedish is such an example of delayed acquisition due to a parametric preference in UG. A syntactic analysis will be proposed for the four recognized stages in the acquisition of negative word order in Swedish which supports the view that a change must occur in the learner's analysis of modal auxiliaries before the last stage has been reached.

This article addresses the question of L1 transfer in L2 acquisition of reflexive binding. It incorporates recent research on Binding Theory which focuses on the relationship between morphological complexity of anaphors and the occurrence of long-distance binding of reflexives (cf. Yang, 1983; Pica, 1987; Hellan, 1988; Battistella, 1989; Huang and Tang, 1989; Cole et al., 1990; Progovac, 1992). Reflexives typically fall into two categories: simple (X0) reflexives that may take long-distance antecedents and complex (XP) refle xives that may not. Acquisition of the English binding pattern by native speakers of Serbo-Croatian requires recognition of the morphological com plexity of English reflexives. Prior to reanalysis, learners are predicted to transfer the L1 X0 anaphor type and incorrectly assign long-distance antece dents to English XP reflexives. The interpretation of English reflexives by native speakers of Serbo- Croatian was investigated using two types of written sentence comprehension tasks. A picture identification task and a multiple-choice questionnaire were administered to intermediate ( n = 20) and advanced (n = 20) L2 learners and a group of English native speaker controls (n = 20). Results consistent across task type support the transfer hypothesis and suggest learners have access to Universal Grammar in second language acquisition.

In this reply, I address certain issues raised by Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak (1992), who argue that White (1991a) is mistaken in claiming that negative evidence can lead to parameter resetting in L2 acquisition. I suggest that, although Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak's reanalysis of White's findings solves a number of empirical and conceptual problems, their analysis raises new problems in its turn. Empirical evidence from French learners of English is presented which suggests that positive L2 data do not guarantee the loss of L1 parameter settings. The implications of this finding are discussed.

In this article we discuss the theoretical implications of an experimental pilot study on the acquisition of word order properties in L2 French by Dutch native speakers. We expected the IL of our L2 learners to show the interaction of three parameters: the Head parameter, a (target of) verb movement parameter and a topicalization to SPEC, CP parameter. Our results appear to support these hypotheses. The Dutch L1 speakers clearly started out with a SOVI word order in their first stage of French L2 acquisition. They quite easily reset the Head Parameter for which there is positive evidence in French. Resetting of the Topicalization Parameter, however, for which we argued negative evidence to be necessary, was much more difficult. Interestingly, the L2 learners appear to adopt grammars that have parameter settings that correspond neither to Dutch, their L1, nor to French, their L2. Those parameter settings however are possible according to the constraints of UG and indeed are found in other languages. Concerning the actual order of sequences in this L2 French acquisition, we found a striking similarity to the scenario found in French language change. Summarizing, we have provided support for the UG approach of L2 acquisition. However, in doing so, we have also raised some new questions, particularly with respect to the difference between German and French L2 acquisition in resetting certain parameters.

This article reports on a cross-cultural investigation of semantic relations that examines the responses of subjects from 8 different cultures to 15 semantic relations. The semantic relations include antonyms, synonyms, class inclusion, and part-whole inclusion. These were chosen due to their use in prior research, and because linguists and cognitive psychologists regard them as linguistically important. Findings reveal significant cross-cultural agreement on the nature of antonymity, which suggests an argument for a property of language use innate to humans.

Consonant with a trend toward investigating professional writing in naturalistic settings, this discourse-analytical study of a corpus of “suggestion letters” written in a Big Eight accounting firm demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. The study substantiates Brown and Levinson's claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Analysis of negative message strategies in ten leading textbooks shows that business communication pedagogy needs to modify strictures on the use of passives, nominalizations, expletive constructions, and hedging particles in light of research on the exigencies of real-world linguistic interaction.

An ongoing research project designed to test Jakobson's claim of a universal rank order among the elements of phonological systems is described and illustrated. The strategy is that of close analysis, on surface, feature and neuromuscular levels successively, of phonetically deviant L2 performance data. While the first two analytical stages tend to corroborate the existence of widely valid cross-language constraints, the third yields evidence for an explanatory hypothesis in terms of the properties of participant neuromuscular mechanisms. It is argued that this ‘physiological hypothesis’ is superior to rival ‘nativist’ postulates in placing Jakobson's hierarchy on a firm ontological footing.

Finnish, French, German, and Spanish) were examined under the hypothesis that they are characterized by commonalities in the use of time. Each study was based on the same speech type, story telling elicited by pictorial materials. The temporal measures were speech and articulation rates, pause duration, phrase length, and percentage of pause time/total time. The hypothesis was confirmed except for studies carried out with identifiably variant methodologies. Further support for the hypothesis was found by contrasting the use of time characteristic of interviewees’ speech. Temporal phenomena have come to assume an important role in research on speech production as the relationship of various independent variables to these phenomena has gradually become known. Among the independent variables, age (e.g., Starkweather, 1980; Kowal, O’Connell and Sabin, 1975) and foreign language proficiency (e.g., Wiese, 1983) are perhaps the most obvious. Differential use of time has typically been interpreted in terms of the various cognitive demands involved in speech production. Although speech type has clearly been acknowledged to be an important independent variable, it is not as yet clear how narrowly a speech type must be operationally defined in order to yield temporal data that can be replicated. As long as speech type categories as broad as reading and spontaneous speech are used, the purpose of replicability and predictability will not be attained. On the other hand, if the speech type category yields replicable data only for a trivially narrow subset of experimental situations, again it becomes a useless category. It is the thesis of the

The significance of the encoding of sex and gender for questions about the relationship between language and culture, and between language and thought, is just beginning to be explored systematically.' Language and gender research, arising within the tradition of Western feminist theory, has overrelied on examples from IndoEuropean languages and cultures and has, moreover, not integrated this research very well with the current discourse on the nature and meaning of language in culture and society.2 In much of the literature on language and gender there is an assumed but not well documented relation between the extent of patriarchal bias in a culture and what has become known as sexism

There are currently two different linguistically-based approaches to universals in second language acquisition, one stemming from typological universals (Greenberg, 1966) and the other from Chomskyan Universal Grammar. Associated with each approach is a concept of markedness. Typologists define markedness implicationally; current theories of language learnability define markedness in terms of the Subset Principle. Although coming from very different perspectives, these two definitions of markedness coincide in a number of predictions they make for L1 and L2 acquisition. Similarities and differences between these two approaches to markedness and acquisition are discussed in this paper.

In a series of studies, Suzanne Flynn (1984; 1987a; 1987b) has proposed a specific theory with regard to Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1986) and second language learning. The present study, a replication of the methodology and hypotheses in Flynn (1987b), utilizes Arabic-speaking learners of ESL, who are predicted by Flynn's theory to perform much like her Spanish-speaking subjects. Present findings, however, contradict those of Flynn's work and, thus, cast doubt on her theory of Universal Grammar and L2 learning. Closer examination then reveals that the linguistic underpinnings of Flynn's theory in Huang (1982) have been superseded by the more recent analysis of Koopman (1984), which does not support Flynn's theory. Furthermore, certain assumptions on processing main and subordinate clauses (Townsend and Bever, 1978) and sentence anaphora (Carden, 1986; Reinhart, 1986), which have the capacity to predict Flynn's findings, also fail satisfactorily to predict the results from the speakers of Arabic. Finally, an analysis that predicts a failure of parsing under certain conditions is presented and found to predict the present findings with a high degree of accuracy. However, the parsing analysis must be subjected to further study with an aim toward falsification before it can be assumed to be conclusive.

The durations of vowels preceding voiced-voiceless stops in utterances produced by three esophageal speakers and three normal speakers were measured. Vowels were significantly longer before voiced stops than before voiceless stops for both esophageal and normal speakers. For either postvocalic consonant environment, the average absolute durations of the vowels of the esophageal speakers were longer than those of the normal speakers. Speaker-group comparisons revealed no significant difference in vowel duration preceding voiceless stops; however, the average absolute duration of vowels preceding voiced stops was significantly longer for the esophageal group. Speaker-group comparisons revealed no significant differences in the relative differences in vowel duration preceding voiced-voiceless stops. The data were interpreted to support the view that the vowel length variation observed is a language-specific behavior governed by a phonological rule of the English language, rather than simply a language-universal behavior governed by inherent physiological characteristics of the speech-production mechanism. Moreover, it was suggested that this phonological rule is a lengthening rule, which lengthens vowels before voiced consonants, rather than a shortening rule, which shortens vowels before voiceless consonants.

Three studies using adult native speakers of English are reported. Each study asked subjects to label elliptical or triangular figures of different size with a CVC trigram. It was the purpose of these studies to obtain evidence in support of the " phonetic symbolism " hypothesis. Subjects agreed about the relationship between vowel sounds and the size of figure regardless of shape. The sound /a/ was more often chosen for large figures while /i/ was more often chosen for small. A less striking but discernible trend was observed for the labelling of figures with vowel sounds. It was tentatively concluded that, for English speakers, there do exist unrecognized yet consistent bases for relating sounds and visual stimuli.

The fundamental frequency contour of a 700-msec. vocoded utterance, "November" [no'vεmb ], was systematically varied to produce 72 contours, different in f0 at the stress and over the terminal glide. The contours were recorded (1) carried on the speech wave, (2) as modulated sine waves. Swedish and American subjects classified (1) both speech and sine-wave contours as either terminally rising or terminally falling (psychophysical judgments), (2) speech contours as questions or statements (linguistic judgments). For both groups, two factors acted in complementary relation to govern linguistic judgments: perceived terminal glide and f0 at the stress. Listeners tended to classify contours with an apparent terminal rise and/or high stress as questions, contours with an apparent terminal fall and/or low stress as statements. For both speech and sine waves psychophysical judgments of terminal glide were influenced by earlier sections of the contour, but the effects were reduced for sine-wave contours, and there were several instances in which speech psychophysical judgments followed the linguistic more closely than the sine wave judgments. It is suggested that these instances may reflect the control exerted by linguistic decision over perceived auditory shape.