Lardiere 2006

Second Language Research 22,3 (2006); pp.
239– 242
Attainment and acquirability in second

language acquisition
Donna Lardiere Georgetown University, Washington
When the editors of Second Language Research first inquired about the
possibility of my guest-editing the special thematic issue of this volume,
the topic they had in mind was ‘fossilization’. This theme, however, with
its underlying focus on ultimate failure in second language acquisition
(SLA), eventually came to feel too limiting. It is undeniable that many
(if not most) adult second language (L2) acquirers ‘fail’ if ‘success’ is
loosely defined as acquiring native-like competence and performance in
the target language in all respects. Nor is it the case that such ‘failures’
are uninteresting: arriving at an adequate explanation for the differences
we observe between native and non-native language acquisition has long
been a goal of SLA research and can also be expected to contribute to a
deeper understanding of human cognition in general.
However, the research construct that can better exploit such a com-
parison between different kinds of end-states is ‘ultimate attainment’.
Not only is the term itself more neutral in its avoidance of notions of
dubious theoretical value such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’, but it is also
more accurate. The study of ultimate attainment is potentially more illu-
minating in regard to a central goal of modern linguistic inquiry (fol-
lowing Chomsky, 1986): determining what properties must be
attributable to the human mind/brain that could account for the nature
of the complex system of knowledge that has actually been attained. In
other words, we can only hope to understand the nature of the system
by first examining what has actually been acquired (or not), given a par-
ticular linguistic environment and – for SLA – prior knowledge of
another I-language, and then ‘working backwards’ to figure out how
such a system could have possibly been acquired.
Address for correspondence: Donna Lardiere, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University

Washington, Washington, DC 20057, USA; email: lardiere@georgetown.edu
© 2006 SAGE Publications 10.1191/0267658306sr267ed
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240 Introduction
The articles in this issue make it clear that such complex L2 systems
have indeed been attained, even if they are not completely identical to
those of native speakers. All five research articles collected here make
theoretically interesting and testable claims about what is predicted to
be acquirable or not in adult L2 acquisition.
The first two papers, by Goad and White and by Hawkins and
Hattori, explore the role of the first language (L1) in delimiting what
is ultimately attainable in the L2. Both papers argue – one from a
phonological and the other from a syntactic perspective – that under
certain specific conditions it will be impossible for native-like L2 rep-
resentations to be acquired. Goad and White investigate the L2 acqui-
sition of English past tense morphology by native speakers (NSs) of
Mandarin Chinese, arguing against an approach that had previously
tied (relatively) low rates of English past tense marking by Chinese
native speakers to an inability to represent a morphosyntactic feature
([⫹past]) that was unselected in the learners’ L1 (Hawkins and Liszka,
2003). Goad and White propose instead that it is reliance on L1
prosodic structures that constrains L2 production of functional mor-
phology, which is affected by the phonological shape of the particular
stem type. In cases where available L1 structures cannot be adapted,
the authors predict that native-like prosodic representations will be
ultimately unacquirable.
Hawkins and Hattori, meanwhile, following along the lines of the
Hawkins and Liszka study cited above as well as recent research by
Tsimpli (2003) and Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (to appear), further
refine the syntactic featural-deficit approach by restricting the type of
feature they claim cannot be acquired by adult learners to ‘uninter-
pretable’ features that have never been selected in the learner’s L1. They
report that highly proficient Japanese learners of English are signifi-
cantly less sensitive than native English controls to superiority or sub-
jacency effects associated with constraints on wh-movement in
multiple-wh-questions. This difference is attributed to the presence in
English but not in Japanese of an uninterpretable wh- (or EPP-) feature
that forces wh-movement. The authors further explore the possibility
that what appears to be target-like wh-movement in English by native
Japanese speakers may actually be wh-scrambling instead, an option
that is licensed by the L1.

Introduction 241
The next article, by Slabakova, provides a thorough review of recent

research on the L2 acquisition of semantic knowledge, encompassing
results from both linguistic theory-based and neurolinguistic studies in
order to determine if semantic acquisition is subject to age-related
effects. Slabakova carefully teases apart distinct lexical, grammatical
and pragmatic components of the language faculty that are sometimes
indiscriminately lumped together under ‘meaning’, and argues that all
available evidence points to the conclusion that knowledge of phrasal
semantics in the L2 is ultimately acquirable.
The final two research articles, by Sorace and Filiaci and by Hopp,
investigate and compare the processing strategies used by near-native
and native speakers in resolving potentially ambiguous syntactic depen-
dencies. Sorace and Filiaci tested native English speakers of Italian and
monolingual Italian controls on their interpretation of null and overt
pronouns in forward and backward anaphora contexts in Italian. Their
results indicate that the near-native speakers have acquired the neces-
sary syntactic licensing features as well as target-like processing strate-
gies for null subjects in Italian; however, they differ from native
speakers in their choice of antecedent for overt pronouns in the back-
ward anaphora condition. The authors conclude that this difference is
the likely result of indeterminacy at the syntax–pragmatics interface,
since preferences for antecedents of overt pronouns among Italian
native speakers reflect sensitivity to pragmatic factors (such as avoiding
potential miscommunication).
Next, Hopp compares advanced and near-native (L1 Dutch or
English) L2 acquirers of German with German native-speaker controls
on their processing strategies for repairing or reanalysing potential gar-
den path effects of scrambled (OS) word order in German, based on
sensitivity to morphosyntactic cues. Hopp finds a clear effect for profi-
ciency: the near-native but not the advanced speakers in both L1 condi-
tions exhibited reaction times and judgement accuracy scores
implicating the use of processing patterns that were ‘qualitatively iden-
tical’ to those of the German native speaker controls.
Finally, true to the Second Language Research editors’ original top-
ical suggestion, I have included a short book review article on two
recent books about fossilization: one authored by Z.-H. Han and the
other a collection of papers co-edited by Han and T. Odlin. The review

242 Introduction
by Fidler highlights some of the problems associated with defining and

characterizing fossilization that are dealt with in these works.
In sum, the articles collected here offer wide-ranging and comple-
mentary perspectives on the nature of what adult L2 learners are ulti-
mately able to achieve, from phonology to pragmatics, in both
competence and performance. In some cases the L2 end-states under
consideration in these studies are native-like in certain ways and, in
other ways, not; regardless of the ‘native-likeness’ of the outcome, how-
ever, we expect that these and further studies of L2 ultimate attainment
will contribute to an emerging overall picture of the human language
faculty.
References
Chomsky, N. 1986: Knowledge of language: its nature, origin and use.
Praeger.
Hawkins, R. and Liszka, S. 2003: Locating the source of defective past tense
marking in advanced L2 English speakers. In van Hout, R., Hulk, A.,
Kuiken, F. and Towell, R., editors, The interface between syntax and lex-
icon in second language acquisition. Benjamins.
Tsimpli, I.-M. 2003: Features in language development. Paper presented at
EuroSLA 13, Edinburgh, September 2003.
Tsimpli, I.-M. and Dimitrakopoulou, M. to appear: The interpretability
hypothesis: evidence from wh-interrogatives in L2 acquisition. Second
Language Research.

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Second Language Research 22,3 (2006); pp.

Attainment and acquirability in second

Address for correspondence: Donna Lardiere, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University

Downloaded from slr.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN LIBRARY on March 18, 2015

Downloaded from slr.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN LIBRARY on March 18, 2015

The next article, by Slabakova, provides a thorough review of recent

Downloaded from slr.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN LIBRARY on March 18, 2015

by Fidler highlights some of the problems associated with defining and

Downloaded from slr.sagepub.com at UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN LIBRARY on March 18, 2015

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