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 Univ...

background naming is a simple and basic skill of the language which involves semantic, lexical, and phonological levels. there are many different factors affecting the speed and convenience of naming. one of these factors is the word age of acquisition (aoa) and since language processing occurs at an extremely fast rate, psycholinguistics needs a method that has very good temporal resolution. t...

1. I will be arguing from data on vowel shifts in progress, and from principles of language change, that language specific phonetic implementation rules must be part of speaker knowledge, and thus part of language acquisition. Then, I will sketch an abstract model of what phonetic implementation could be like. Having argued these points, I will address how this approach interacts with phonologi...

although the majority of linguists believing in chomskyan revolution have no doubt about the presence of ug in ll acquisition, its availability in l2 acquisition _in general, and in adult l2 acquisition in particular, is controversial. on the one hand, there are proponents of the access to ug in l2 acquisition, lidia white for example, says: therange of option available to the second language l...