Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (1999) 19, 3–21. Printed in the USA.

Copyright © 1999 Cambridge University Press 0267-1905/99 $9.50

SLA AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION*

Susan H. Foster-Cohen

INTRODUCTION

In a brief article published some years ago (Foster-Cohen 1993), I

suggested that fruitful collaboration between the fields of first and second language
acquisition was underexploited. I also suggested that second language researchers
were, in general, better at keeping themselves informed of developments in first
language studies than first language researchers were at paying attention to second
language issues. I think it fair to say that there are some signs this is changing.
One is the now established existence of the journal Language Acquisition
(Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), started in 1990, which publishes work in both first
and second language acquisition with a view to understanding the nature of
language acquisition in general. Its preference for papers that address issues in
formal linguistic theory complements well Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge
University Press), which has always published material relevant to both fields, but
which also goes well beyond acquisition issues in its brief. A second factor seems
to be a gentle but insistent re-examination of issues in bilingualism and a growing
awareness that bilingual studies, second language studies, and first language studies
overlap in important ways in the study of the bilingual individual. One key
indicator of this shift is the appearance of a new journal Bilingualism: Language
and Cognition (Cambridge University Press). Also, as one of the principal
organizers of the recent annual conference of the European Second Language
Association (September, 1998, Paris), which had ‘The Bilingual Individual’ as its
theme, I was happy to see how well bilingual and second language studies could be
made to come together. A confluential trend also seems to be reflected in two
further ways: an increased interest in multiple second language acquisition (L3, L4,
etc.; e.g., Williams and Hammarberg 1998), and a focus among second language
learners on very late stages of language acquisition (Bartning 1997, White and
Genesee 1996) as the upper limits of second language acquisition are placed more
carefully alongside those for first language acquisition.

3
4 SUSAN H. FOSTER-COHEN

However, even if the L1-L2 connections have not always been explored,
most of the ‘big questions’ in the two fields are inherently connected, and advances
in thinking on these questions will form the main focus of this review. In
particular, the question of the extent to which language acquisition is natural
represents, in one form or another, a constant. In first language acquisition, there
is no question that given basic favorable conditions, language will be learned;
however, whether there is a language-specific acquisition device or whether other
cognitive factors, in place for other reasons, are the main agents is still an issue. In
second language studies, there is no such assumption of automatic success, except
in situations of natural child second language acquisition. In fact, the onus is on
those who think a natural language acquisition device is involved in adult second
language acquisition to prove it in the face of ample evidence of acquisition failure
by learners. This contrasts with first language studies where the onus is more
frequently on those who argue for a non-specific mechanism to prove that such a
mechanism can result in the complex knowledge that learners acquire.

A second and related issue involves the nature of the input and the use that
learners are able to make of it. Here, there has been a recent resurgence of interest
among L1 researchers in the didactic nature of the input. This trend now
complements an ongoing interest in L2 studies on the relative utility of didactic and
non-didactic input and their relationships to implicit and explicit learning.

There is also the question of what exactly it is that learners have stored
when they have learned some aspect of language. Many frameworks for explaining
acquisition carry with them automatic answers to this question. A UG explanation
for acquisition implies a rules and representations account of what is stored. A
connectionist account of acquisition implies a non-rule, non-representation,
activated node account of what is stored. Other frameworks, however, leave this
question more open. For example, processing accounts, in which learners work
from processing a string, to analysis of the string, to generalizations about
structures, might use a rule-based, a construction-based, or a connectionist account
of storage.

One particularly thriving approach to questions of both storage and

acquisition involves looking at the extremes of learner variation, namely at
disordered populations. In first language acquisition, the last few years have seen
the spotlight turned fully on Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This research
continues the tradition of looking for double dissociations, that is, children who are
capable in one arena and not in another, and matching children with the reverse set
of competences/deficits. (SLI children are argued to be of normal intelligence and
social adjustment, but to have specific problems with language. There are other
children, e.g., Williams Syndrome children, who are argued to be normal in their
language development while deficient in general intelligence.) Double dissociations
speak to the general question of the modularity of mind and the specific issue of the
modularity of the language faculty. Second language researchers rarely have such
windows on acquisition, although the case of ‘Christopher’ is a notable exception
 SLA AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 5

(Smith and Tsimpli 1995, Tsimpli and Smith in press). Nevertheless, if the goal of
language acquisition research is to understand how a mind can learn a language,
then this is an area that ought to be of interest to all acquisition researchers.

In what follows I will address each of these areas in turn, and then
conclude with some consideration of methodology, since any empirical conclusions
are only as good as the data on which the analyses were based, and there is
considerable discussion at the moment about the validity of certain types of data and
about new ways to extract meaingful data from learners.

IS THERE A LANGUAGE INSTINCT?

There seems to be a general assumption among second language

researchers that first language researchers have almost all adopted some version of
a Universal Grammar (UG) approach. One sees this assumption voiced when
researchers interested in investigating the role of UG in second language acquisition
set up their research design. Of course, as a rhetorical tactic this is inevitable
because if UG is not viable for L1, then there is no point in looking at it in L2.
However, there are many in first language acquisition studies who would rightly
bristle at the suggestion that UG is widely accepted in L1 (Tomasello 1995), since
there are still undoubtedly more researchers in child language research who adopt a
position other than UG than adopt a UG position. This is hardly surprising given
the linguistically technical nature of the UG hypothesis on the one hand, and the
great variety of training possessed by those interested in first language acquisition
(psychology, education, anthropology, etc.) on the other. However, it is important
to recognize that, while researchers hostile to UG reject the claim of ‘special’
nativism in its particular guise of UG, they are still open to ‘general’ nativism in
which other, innate, aspects of human cognitive functioning are argued to account
for language acquisition. (See the special issue of Second Language Research,
edited by Eckman [1996], for discussion of specific versus general nativism in both
first and second language development.)

First language researchers who adopt a ‘general’ nativism position argue

that children bring cognitive expectations to the analysis of the world around them
and to the language to which they are exposed. While perhaps a weaker tradition
than it was in the heyday of Piagetian research, there are nonetheless many whose
main interest is to show the effects of non-linguistic cognition on language
development. Lieven, Pine and Baldwin (1997), Marchman, Plunkett and
Goodman (1997), Pine and Lieven (1997), and Tomasello (1998) are among those
who are currently explicitly arguing for a non-UG account of first language
acquisition. Their position is that children learn construction by construction and
that it is the position of a word in relation to the other words in the construction
that is both noticed by children and made the basis of generalizations to other
constructions. This is a resurfacing of Braine’s original pivot-open grammar,
which has lain dormant for a while following fatal criticisms in the early seventies,
new life having been breathed into it by demonstrations from connectionist
6 SUSAN H. FOSTER-COHEN

researchers that it ought to be possible in principle to account for a significant

portion of grammar acquisition in this way, and by recent developments in
‘construction grammar’ (e.g., Goldberg 1995; see Tomasello’s review article of
this book [Tomasello 1998] and the discussion that follows it from a variety of
authors).

A second language approach which has some of the same hallmarks is

Truscott’s proposal that second language acquisition is a case of building up
generalizations from instances (Truscott 1998b). Learners, under this account,
form concepts about language from exposure to specific examples or instances of
linguistic data. However, Truscott suggests that learners cannot learn from
instances of linguistic features without knowing what linguistic features to pay
attention to. Such concerns lead him back to UG as a constraining mechanism on
unconscious ‘noticing,’ since if learners have no idea what is worth noticing or
paying attention to, there is no possible way in which they can form appropriate
linguistic conclusions. Truscott 1998a is a trenchant critique of the notion of
‘noticing,’ which has been a popular idea in recent years (Ellis 1994, Schmidt
1990; 1993; 1994), which, he argues, can only be salvaged by proper couching
within linguistic theory, and which should probably be “reformulated as a claim
that ‘noticing’ is necessary for the acquisition of metalinguistic knowledge but not
competence” (Truscott 1998a:103).

An approach to second language acquisition which is more purely ‘general

nativist’ is that of Klein and Perdue (1997a), who believe that second language
learners come to the task with cognitive expectations about how the linguistic world
is organized and evolve a ‘basic variety’ of early second language production based
not just on transfer from their L1, but on general typological expectations. This
approach has its roots in Slobin’s suggestions some years ago (Slobin 1973) that
children analyze the input using a number of ‘Operating Principles’ (which are
argued to be not specifically linguistic) and deduce a ‘Basic Child Grammar.’ The
data used to argue the second language case by Klein and Perdue include, for
example, the similarities in ways to code time, methods of discourse organization,
and the function of adverbs across learners of a variety of second languages who
come from a variety of different first languages. A useful summary of their
position is presented by Klein and Perdue (1997b) as a special issue of Second
Language Research devoted to the ‘Basic Variety.’ Their introductory article is
followed by various critical responses to it, all of which might have been more
positive if Klein and Perdue had not attempted at the end of the article to go beyond
their original idea and suggest that the basic variety is compatible with a UG
perspective if one assumes the mechanism of ‘feature strength,’ and specifically that
all features are ‘weak’ in the ‘Basic Variety.’ That Klein and Perdue feel they need
to address the UG question at all shows the immense power it holds within the
second language research field. The fact, however, that many of the criticisms, in
my opinion, hit home also shows the difficulty with UG proposals: They often
consist of relatively simple ideas sitting on a complex set of interconnected
assumptions, such that to propose even a modest contribution to the debate implies
 SLA AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 7

ramifications far beyond the original proposal, all of which have to be checked and
re-checked to ascertain the consequences.

One gets the distinct impression these days that second language acquisition
research cannot escape UG. Like Alice in Through the looking glass, as hard as
people attempt to avoid it, they always seem to be heading straight towards it;
drawn to account for themselves in its terms, even if not accepting its conclusions.
In first language studies, far fewer researchers are drawn to the same kind of
accounting, although there are still many who see it as both an important source of
hypotheses about language acquisition itself, and as a means, thereby, to refine the
UG hypothesis itself (Foster-Cohen 1996). Among first language researchers,
many of the questions that were among the first to be raised continue to motivate
research; these include, for example, the search for functional categories in early
stages (Bohnacker 1997, Müller, Crysmann and Kaiser 1996), the nature of pro-
drop (Hamann 1996) and syntactic movement (Labelle 1996), and the nature of
children’s understanding of quantification (Crain, et al. 1996). In second language
acquisition research, a recent article by Paradis, Le Corre and Genesee (1998) has
suggested that the sequential acquisition of agreement and tense features in children
learning French as an L2 shows the separateness of these features in the grammar.
This particular article then goes on to interpret the findings in light of the three
currently most influential UG accounts of SLA: 1) Schwartz and Sprouse’s Full
Access/Full Transfer account (Schwartz and Sprouse 1996), which argues that the
initial state of an L2 learner is one in which the learner both has access to UG and
transfers into L2 learning all that he/she knows about the L1; 2) Eubank’s Weak
Transfer/Valueless Features Hypothesis (Eubank 1996), which argues that while
both lexical and functional categories transfer from the L1 to the L2, the parameter
values associated with the functional categories do not transfer; and 3) Vainikka
and Young-Scholten’s Lexical Transfer/Minimal Trees hypothesis (Vainikka and
Young-Scholten 1996), which, in line with Minimalist Theory, posits only a lexical
grammar with no functional categories as the initial L2 state. These three accounts
are conveniently presented in a single issue of Second Language Research on the
nature of the initial state for SLA, edited by Eubank and Schwartz (1996).

Child second language is currently severely under-studied despite the

strength of articles such as Paradis, et al. (1998), which continues the Canadian
tradition of research in early L2 acquisition, and Grondin and White (1996), which
shows the presence of functional categories in beginning L2 and thus distinguishes
itself from Vainikka and Young-Scholten’s arguments for an early purely lexical
phase in L2. Lakshmanan’s study (Lakshmanan 1994) still stands relatively alone
in child SLA, awaiting more contributions from those interested in exploiting the
particular window that child second language acquisition can offer on both language
acquisition and linguistic theory, namely acquisition by individuals young enough to
be within the critical period, but yet with a first language already learned. One
such contribution is set to appear (Schwartz in press), which compares L2 children,
L2 adolescents, and L2 adults, and specifically addresses the issue of ‘language
instinct’ for second language acquisition. It argues in favor of such an instinct.
8 SUSAN H. FOSTER-COHEN

Finally, whereas first language researchers seem to have accepted the

‘gentle decline’ definition of the language critical period for L1 argued for by
Newport (1990), the ‘critical period’ for second language acquisition is still a
subject of ongoing discussion. In SLA research, there are continuing attempts to
explore the notion of a critical period as an explanation for the lack of success in
second language learning when compared with first language learning. A current
contribution is made by Bialystok (1997), who argues against a purely maturational
sensitive period for SLA and in favor of a processing explanation for the apparent
differences between older and younger learners. (Pienemann’s recent discussion
[1998] of his Processability Theory makes similar claims.) In addition, Lee and
Schachter (1997) argue against a unitary notion of a critical period for SLA and in
favor of multiple ‘sensitive periods’ for different parts of the grammar during
which the learner is more able to respond to input relevant to a particular part of
the grammar than either before or after the sensitive period. Children who start
their second language learning after the sensitive period for, say, subjacency, will
have problems with that set of facts about the language, though not necessarily with
other aspects of the language. These studies throw interesting light on what it is
that distinguishes first from second language acquisition by looking at second-
language-acquiring children. One hopes that more such studies will be forthcoming
in the future.

WHAT’S THE INPUT LIKE?

First language research has a very long tradition of trying to determine

what the input could and does teach a child. These discussions continue unabated
among those who believe that the answer to the puzzle of first language acquisition
must lie in large measure in the analyses that the young child can make of the
ambient language or languages. Thus, there is a regular flow of studies suggesting
that caregivers produce more or less subtle cues for dividing the speech stream into
words (Hung and Peters 1997), for learning vocabulary items (Bloom and Wynn
1997, Masur 1997, Naigles and Hoff-Ginsberg 1998, Oshima-Takane and Derat
1996, Pearson, et al. 1997, Tardif, Shatz and Naigles 1997), and for forming word
categories (Shi, Morgan and Allopena 1998). This effort adds grist to the mill of
those who, since the early days of psycholinguistics, have been trying to prove
Chomsky’s ‘poverty of the stimulus’ problem to be a non-problem. On a number
of fronts, attempts have been made since the mid-sixties to show that children get
adequate input from which they can learn. In the early days, the focus was on
showing that caretaker speech was grammatical; now there is a focus on showing
that there are viable correlations between what adults say to children and the
language that the children produce (see the studies cited above). Another approach
is to show that children do actually receive negative feedback and explicit
instruction which they can use. Saxton (1997) used an experimental design to show
that irregular past tenses for novel verbs are learned more effectively after explicit
correction of an incorrect form produced by the child than after simple positive
input. This result is in line with Clark and Grossman (1998) who suggest that two-
and three-year-olds listen to, take note of, and use explicit instruction from their
 SLA AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 9

mothers about how to use new words. And Evey and Merriman (1998) found that
children’s abilities to learn new words depend on corrective feedback from adults.
These studies may indeed show that children are exposed to some negative evidence
and that they can make use of it, at least in the area of morpho-lexical development.
However, they do not show that negative input is more than a peripheral effect, and
they must be taken together with a range of other studies, including those within the
non-UG tradition, which show that other aspects of the lexicon are deduced by
children from positive input (Beals 1997, Bloom and Wynn 1997, Tardif, Shatz and
Naigles 1997). Moreover, to find an effect for input in general (positive or
negative) on the metalinguistically most easily tractable part of the linguistic system
is not surprising. Everyone can talk about words. But not everyone can talk about,
or even correct, long-distance dependencies, tense and agreement features, or
reflexive interpretations; and that was one of Chomksy’s points back in 1965. Not
only do children not get negative input (well, they get a little, it turns out), but the
crucial aspects of language that they come to ‘know’ (unconsciously) as adults
could not have been taught in any overt fashion by adults because those adults are
unable to access without explicit training the knowledge they would have to be
teaching.

In second language acquisition, the input debate revolves around the issue
of how exposure becomes ‘intake.’ Part of that picture involves the nature and role
of ‘noticing,’ already alluded to, as well as the question of the extent to which
second language acquisition can and does involve implicit as opposed to explicit
learning. Of particular interest here is the work of N. Ellis and others interested in
observing learners under laboratory conditions in which both the input and output
are so tightly controlled that the relationship between exposure and knowledge are
more visible. (A special issue of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, edited
by Hulstijn and Dekeyser [1997], summarizes current research.) The disadvantage
of this kind of work is that the input is often fabricated and the learning conditions
are often unnatural, but the advantage is that variables can be controlled much more
tightly than is normally the case. This tradition of research will no doubt continue
as a complement to more observational or natural experimental approaches.
Tentative conclusions from this new research stream support a processing approach
in which memory for instances and associations play a larger role than the kind of
rule-based acquisition predicted by a UG approach. Obviously, for ethical and
practical reasons, a parallel research stream is unlikely to emerge in first language
studies, except perhaps for very late developments in which the role of controlled
input via computer might be studied with respect to, say, late vocabulary
development or metalinguistic skills.

RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS

The previous two sections dealt, respectively, with the nature of the
language acquisition device and the nature of the input which provides some or all
of the data (according to one’s theoretical convictions) that the device operates on.
There remains the question of what it is, exactly, that is acquired. At one level, the
10 SUSAN H. FOSTER-COHEN

answer is simple: language. But how exactly does ‘language’ reside in the
individual? Here the main debate, in both first and second language acquisition
studies, is whether there are mental representations of linguistic knowledge or
simply well-worn pathways in a connectionist network. In the latter scenario, what
passes for a representation is simply a series of primed nodes which ensure that the
person will comprehend, produce, and judge as grammatical what he or she
evidently does comprehend, produce, and consider grammatical.

As already indicated in the section on the language ‘instinct,’ work by

Lieven, Pine, and others is currently continuing to explore the notion that children
learn their first language construction by construction, thus building up pathways of
recognition from instances. Köpcke (1998) is another such researcher, arguing that
inflectional morphology is built up via pattern recognition rather than involving the
acquisition of rules, although he does say that the end product of acquisition may be
rules. Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, Parisi and Plunkett (1997)
represents the work of those who argue vigorously for a connectionist account of
both acquisition and storage.

It is interesting that, while in L1 studies the success of a connectionist

account seems to lead to almost automatic rejection of a UG account (although the
concession by Köpcke [1998] that represented rules may still be the endpoint of
learning suggests a compromise position), many of those endorsing a connectionist
account in L2 explicitly indicate that it need not be to the exclusion of UG. Thus,
N. Ellis (1996a) argues for the memorization of sequences of words and the
extraction of rules from the sequences, but says that, to the extent that UG does not
deal with the lexicon and syntactic categories, this approach complements UG. In
Ellis (1996b), he also suggests that UG is a way of describing the endpoint and not
the processes by which learners reach that endpoint. Similarly, van Patten (1996)
suggests that UG is a constantly present knowledge source which can thus exist side
by side with the processing account. As we have seen, Truscott (1998b), in his
‘instance theory’ account, proposes more than just a non-interventionist role for UG
in an otherwise processing approach, suggesting that it is UG which actually
constrains what the processing mechanism will recognize as an instance of linguistic
material to be memorized. The differences between the two fields of L1 and L2
research with respect to rules versus connectionist accounts of linguistic knowledge
thus seem to be two-fold. First, the greater power of UG within SLA studies than
within L1 studies leads researchers more frequently to seek compromise positions
so as not to give up on UG while the jury is still out; and second, the concern that
UG may well not be able to account for much, if any, of SLA leads second
language researchers to be more interested in connectionist accounts out of a
genuine need to look for alternatives, even by those attracted to the UG hypothesis
for L1.

WHAT KINDS OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES ARE THERE?

 SLA AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 11

Individual differences in language acquisition, both first and second, have

been a topic of interest for some time. Questions of cognitive style, personality
variables, motivation, gender, and so on continue to be studied in both fields.
Recent first language studies include Bornstein, Haynes and Painter (1998), who
show variation in child vocabulary to be positively correlated with a variety of
maternal variables; Thal, et al. (1996), who suggest children may differ in the size
of linguistic unit they can store and manipulate; Rollins, Snow and Willett (1996),
who suggest children vary in how they extend their utterances beyond two-word
combinations; and Elsen (1996) who suggests children’s use of ‘expressive’ versus
‘analytic’ style utterances depends on the context. There is also an interesting on-
going line of research comparing language acquisition in monolinguals with
bilinguals, another source of individual difference (Chitiri and Willows 1997,
Davidson, et al. 1997, Oller, et al. 1997); and, of course, cross-linguistic
comparisons continue to be used to tease out language universals (Allen and Crago
1996, Lléo and Prinz 1996, Ravid and Avidor 1998, Valian and Eisenberg 1996).
In second language research, the issues of gender (Scarcella and Zimmerman
1998), the degree of success in reaching the target language (Bongaerts, et al.
1997), the role of affect on individual success (Schumann 1998), and the
relationship between learning style (aptitude) and implicit versus explicit learning
conditions (Robinson 1997) are among the topics of continuing interest.

However, current interest in individual differences in first language

acquisition seems to be mainly focused on the pathological ends of the spectrum
where individual differences are not only profound, but constitute recognizable
syndromes. Deafness (Anderson and Reilly 1997), blindness, Down’s Syndrome,
autism, and Williams syndrome (Stevens and Karmiloff-Smith 1997) are among
those syndromes that have formed the focus of much research (see, e.g., Tager-
Flusberg 1994), and work in those areas continues. The most intensively studied
syndrome at the moment seems to be Specific Language Impairment (SLI), a
condition that involves normal scores with standard measures of non-verbal
intelligence, but that indicates significant problems with language, largely in
language production. Most energy has been taken up with trying to define
precisely what the deficits are. On the one hand, researchers such as Rice, Wexler
and Cleave (1995) argue that the root of the problem lies in a prolongation of a
specific stage of verb evolution in normal children called the Optional Infinitive
Stage in which children use uninflected verb forms where the adult version would
be inflected (Rice, Noll and Grimm 1997). On the other hand, there are
researchers such as Clahsen (1991), who thinks that there is a general problem with
missing agreement, and van der Lely and Stollwerck (1997), who think the problem
lies with a general problem of dependencies between items within a sentence. This
debate is particularly interesting in relation to SLI children learning languages such
as German where uninflected and inflected verb forms occupy radically different
positions in the sentence. According to the research, German SLI children
understand that uninflected forms are sentence final, and produce them in the right
place, even when an inflected form in second position would be the grammatical
option. Other researchers focus not on the representational (‘knowledge’)
12 SUSAN H. FOSTER-COHEN

differences between SLI and normal children, but on processing constraints,

suggesting that these differences rather than differences in knowledge are
responsible for the abnormal pattern of behaviors (Dollaghan 1998, Edwards and
Lahey 1998, Fazio 1997). One thing that is becoming clear is that monolithic
definitions of SLI are inappropriate, and as more specific targeted testing becomes
possible, as a result of linguistic analyses having shown what needs to be tested,
different sub-populations of SLI children are being identified.

As with the study of normal children, the question being hotly debated is
whether the deficit, or deficits, in SLI children are the result of either damage or
delay to particular linguistic mechanisms (and the weight of the evidence at the
moment seems to be on delay, rather than damage; Franks and O’Connell 1996), or
to more general processing mechanisms. There are those researchers who argue
that SLI children have similar problems with non-linguistic tasks, suggesting a non-
UG/non-specifically linguistic account of their language problems (Bertolini and
Leonard 1996, Conti-Ramsden 1997, Fazio 1997); conversely, other researchers
favor a specifically linguistic account based on the malfunctioning of innate
mechanisms (Hadley and Rice 1996, Rice 1997). And then there are those who fall
somewhere in the middle, such as Kushnir and Blake (1996), who argue that SLI
children have problems with memory for verbal items in sequence (i.e., their
ability to repeat a list of words). As with all disorder studies, the value of this
work to the understanding of language acquisition in general is enormous, provided
one can argue that such learners exhibit non-pathological behavior in all other
respects apart from those argued to be abnormal. This condition is by no means
easy to establish, and it must be seen against another prime question of current
research; namely, ‘is the language learning mind modular?’

Second language studies have much less access to dissociation data. The
exception is ‘Christopher’ (Smith and Tsimpli 1995, Tsimpli and Smith in press),
whose enhanced ability to learn the morpho-syntax of numerous (more than 17)
languages demonstrates a clear dissociation of the computational aspects of
language from those argued to be part of more central processes (i.e., pragmatics).
This dissociation finds ample support in the L1 literature (e.g., Levy 1997, van der
Lely 1997), and there are clearly connections to be made with the relative difficulty
second language learners have in acquiring the pragmatics of a second language,
although a good start can be made via the recent special issue of Studies in Second
Language Acquisition on the development of pragmatic competence, edited by
Kasper (1996), which argues specifically for a more psycholinguistic approach to
second language pragmatics, thus opening up the possibility of more fruitful
collaboration between the two fields.

SOME METHODOLOGICAL CONCERNS

 SLA AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 13

Since conclusions about language development are only as good as the

measures of linguistic knowledge used to draw those conclusions, there is ongoing
concern to examine the tools that are currently in use and to develop improved
ones. Two very useful books in first language acquisition focus on developing
better ways of getting at children’s linguistic competence. Crain and Thornton
(1998) and McDaniel, McKee and Smith Cairns (1996) are aimed at helping child
language researchers choose or develop experimental paradigms and statistical
measures that will be as illuminating as possible. It is no accident that both of these
books come out of a tradition which presumes children have complex linguistic
knowledge from the start (a UG viewpoint), since the challenge for such an
approach is to find ingenious ways of tapping into that knowledge from the earliest
age possible. For those who adopt a stance in which children are presumed to
deduce linguistic structure from the input, there is no such imperative to find new
techniques usable with younger and younger children.

Another pressing concern for first language researchers is to find ways of

measuring different languages in parallel, something L2 studies have always had to
do. Extending tried and true methods of language assessment from the language
they were designed for to other languages is not easy, as those who develop clinical
and educational tests for different language backgrounds can easily attest. And for
first language researchers, even the ubiquitous Mean Length of Utterance measure
must be carefully scrutinized. Thordardottir and Weismer (1998), for example,
argue for specific modifications to the MLU calcuation to provide an accurate
picture of structural acquisition in Icelandic. Even more crucially, Rollins, Snow
and Willett (1996) warn that children from the same language group and with the
same MLU may have used a variety of different strategies to lengthen their
utterances, and thus may not be comparable on other measures.

In second language research, where MLU is rarely an appropriate

measure, the debate seems to revolve around grammaticality judgments and
whether they really do tell a researcher what the learner knows. Davies and Kaplan
(1998), for example, suggest that native and non-native speakers are not the same,
so that even when a non-native speaker accepts the same sentences as a native
speaker, they are not, or may not, be doing so for the same reasons. Murphy
(1997) also cautions that subjects respond more accurately and more quickly to
grammaticality judgement tasks in written rather than in oral mode, which raises
uncomfortable questions about the nature of linguistic knowledge that researchers
cannot afford to ignore in either L1 or L2 research.

CONCLUSION

I have tried in this short summary of recent research to draw out themes
that engage both L1 and L2, or ought to. As will be obvious, my review is most
definitely skewed towards the psycholinguistic and grammatical/computational
aspects of language. With more space, one could cover comparisons in additional
areas: in discourse and text research, in the role of language teaching in specific
14 SUSAN H. FOSTER-COHEN

contexts (e.g., the late acquisition of the lexicon among first and second language
learners), and in first and second language learners’ abilities to process variations in
speech patterns. I hope, however, to have provided at least some impression of the
‘hot topics’ in the two fields and to have provided enough pointers towards the
authors and their work so that further study of these issues is facilitated.

NOTES

*My special thanks go to Lucy Mitchell, British Institute librarian, whose efforts to
find me sources went far beyond the call of duty.

Annotated Bibliography

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 1998-pres. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

This is a new journal; its first issue appeared in April 1998. A significant
portion of each issue will be organized around a keynote article followed
by a number of responses from others in the field, with a reply from the
author afterwards. Perhaps slightly oddly, its first issue concerns
Pienemann’s Processability Theory as applied to both L1 and L2, which is
not perhaps an approach one thinks of immediately in the context of
bilingualism studies. However, the choice may be viewed as marking a
significant shift towards drawing bilingualism studies more firmly into the
fold of theoretically-driven studies of first and second language acquisition.

Crain, S. and R. Thornton. 1998. Investigations in Universal Grammar: A guide to

experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

Language acquisition researchers working within a UG tradition have

sometimes been unfairly criticized for not getting their hands sufficiently
dirty in the data pool. Any lingering sentiments of that kind (not already
dispelled by McDaniel, et al. 1996) ought certainly to be dispelled by this
book which focuses on the Elicited Production Task (for production) and
the Truth Value Judgment Task (for comprehension), with an emphasis on
the reproducibility of research results.
 SLA AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 15

Fletcher, P. and B. MacWhinney (eds.) 1995. Handbook of child language.

Oxford: Blackwell.

Although this volume was published just prior to the period covered by this
review, it is a useful overview of many aspects of current child language
study, and it can be used as a basis for further reading in first language
acquisition. It covers both UG and non-UG approaches, although
considerably more space is devoted to the latter than the former.

Foster-Cohen, S. 1999. An introduction to child language development. Harlow,

Essex: Longman.

This is an introductory textbook for undergraduate students which covers

what I consider to be the key issues in child first (and to some extent,
second) language development. It argues that both UG and non-UG
approaches are necessary in order to account for the full range of language
development facts.

Pienemann, M. 1998. Language processing and second language development:

Processability theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

This is an ambitious attempt to account for practically all aspects of both

first and second language development (interlanguage, strategies, age
differences, effectiveness of input, etc.) by means of a model of language
production (encoding procedures) which is built up gradually according to
an implicational hierarchy justified on processing grounds. It claims to
‘predict’ the course of grammar development and to explain how different
grammars are processable at different stages of acquisition. It is discussed
at length in the first issue of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

Schumann, J. 1998. The neurobiology of affect in language. Oxford: Blackwell

[also Language Learning Monograph Series. 48. SUPP/1.]

This volume is an attempt to apply new knowledge about the brain

chemistry of emotions to language acquisition. It is a logical extension of
his early work on the importance of affect within the context of his
Acculturation Theory of language development (Schumann 1978).

VanPatten, B. 1996. Input processing and grammar instruction in second language

acquisition. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

VanPatten’s approach is an interesting complement to Pienemann’s since,

unlike Pienemann, VanPatten’s starting point is learner comprehension, not
learner production. VanPatten’s suggestion is that learners begin by
focusing on lexical items because these are perceived to carry the
16 SUSAN H. FOSTER-COHEN

informational content. Only when the informational content can be

processed relatively automatically are learners able to concentrate on
grammatical morphemes which they perceive not to carry meaning.

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