Experience, aptitude and individual differences in native language ultimate attainment

Individual differences in native language attainment: A review article1

This article reviews several recent studies suggesting that – contrary to a widespread belief – native speakers of the same language do not share the same mental grammar. The studies examined various aspects of linguistic knowledge, including inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and more complex constructions with subordinate clauses. The findings suggest that in some cases, language...

Second Language Acquisition and Ultimate Attainment

In second language acquisition (L2A) research, ultimate attainment refers to the outcome or end point of acquisition, and is used interchangeably with the terms final state, end state, and asymptote. "Ultimate" is not to be thought of as synonymous with "nativelike," although nativelikeness is one of the observed outcomes of L2A. Most L2A studies have focused on the initial state, stages in L2 ...

Ultimate Attainment in Second Language Acquisition

Subcortical Correlates of Individual Differences in Aptitude

The study of individual differences encompasses broad constructs including intelligence, creativity, and personality. However, substantially less research is devoted to the study of specific aptitudes in spite of their importance to educational, occupational, and avocational success. We sought to determine subcortical brain structural correlates of several broad aptitudes including Math, Vocabu...

More Individual Differences in Language Attainment: How Much Do Adult Native Speakers of English Know about Passives and Quantifiers?

This paper provides experimental evidence suggesting that there are considerable differences in native language attainment, and that these are at least partially attributable to individual speakers’ experience. Experiment 1 tested high academic attainment (hereafter, HAA) and low academic attainment (LAA) participants' comprehension using a sentence-picture matching task. Test sentences compris...