The role of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition

This paper discusses the question of whether Universal Grammar is relevant to the study of second language acquisition—in particular second language phonology. It will be shown that the notion of Universal Grammar has been hard to define coherently, which makes it difficult to implement it in second language acquisition research. One framework which offers a possibly explicit definition of Universal Grammar is Optimality Theory, in which phonological constraints are proposed to be universal. This makes it possible to assess the evidence for Universal Grammar directly. However, cases where Universal Grammar has been invoked to explain certain aspects of second language acquisition (in particular, errors made by second language learners) turn out to be largely spurious. The tentative conclusion must be that there is no role for Universal Grammar in second language acquisition. Arguably, this is also a better research strategy methodologically.