Verbal inflection and verb placement in first and second language acquisition

Studies of language development suggest that child learners nearly always reach an error-free stage in the acquisition of grammar whereas adult learners who reach an error-free proficiency level are rare. Moreover, children achieve this “perfect” stage seemingly effortlessly and quickly unlike adults. One explanation for these differences comes from an idea of an innate language device which is bound to a critical period and that is only available during infancy and childhood (Lenneberg 1967, Johnson & Newport 1989, Mayberry & Eichen 1991). In this contribution, we present new data from an explorative study, which bear on the issue of critical age effects. We address the following question: is there support for the claim that adult acquisition of grammar differs from child acquisition of grammar? Our study includes child L2 learners. In previous work on critical age effects child L1 learners have been compared to adult L2 learners (e.g., Patkowski 1982). Such a comparison may lead to a possible confounding of effects of type of acquisition (L1 vs. L2) and age. Inclusion of child L2 learners may help to overcome this confusion. A second point is the fact that we take a snapshot of the development of learners; we do not compare end-states of learners. The focus will be on qualitative differences between groups with the underlying assumption that different types of errors reflect different learning strategies. Adopting the critical period theory as an initial working hypothesis, we predict that variation in the population of learners of Dutch is systematic in the following way: child L2 patterns like child L1 and differs from adult L2.