Although a growing number of second language acquisition (SLA) studies take linguistic complexity as a dependent variable, the term is still poorly defined and often used with different meanings, thus posing serious problems for research synthesis and knowledge accumulation. This article proposes a simple, coherent view of the construct, which is…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal…

This article clarifies some ideas presented in this issue's keynote article (Amaral and Roeper, this issue) and discusses several issues raised by the contributors' comments on the nature of the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory. One of the key goals of the article is to unequivocally state that MG is not a parametric theory and that its…

This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue. Multiple Grammars advances the claim that optionality is a constitutive characteristic of any one grammar, with interlanguage grammars being perhaps the clearest examples of a…

This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammar (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue and touches on other second language acquisition research. Topics discussed include the concept of second language (L2) optionality, a hypothesis regarding the acquisition of the…

Optionality is a central phenomenon in second language acquisition (SLA), for which any adequate theory must account. Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) offer an appealing approach to it, using Roeper's Multiple Grammars Theory, which was created with first language in mind but which extends very naturally to SLA. They include…

This article examines the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue and presents a critique of the research that went into the theory. Topics discussed include the allegation that the bilinguals and second language learners in the original article are primarily students in an academic setting, Amaral…

Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) argue that all speakers -- regardless of whether monolingual or bilingual -- have multiple grammars in their mental language representations. They further claim that this simple assumption can explain many things: optionality in second language (L2) language behaviour, multilingualism, language…

In recent second language (L2) research it has been proposed that unlike linguistic phenomena pertaining to internal interfaces, those at external interfaces pose greater difficulty to adult L2 learners and may not be fully acquired. It has further been pointed out that such problematic acquisition at the interface level should not be attributed…

This article reports empirical findings from an ongoing investigation into the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonemic contrasts. Specifically, we consider the status and role of the phenomenon of hypercorrection in the various stages through which L2 learners develop and internalize a target language (TL) contrast. We adopt the prevailing…

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a "surface" problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three…

This review article evaluates the intersection of the content of two recent anthologies in second language (L2) phonology. One of the books lays out both the methodological context and theoretical underpinnings of the field, whereas the other volume reports 11 empirical studies on the L2 acquisition of several aspects of pronunciation by adult…

Recent research on advanced and near-native second-language (L2) speakers has focused on the acquisition of interface phenomena, for example at the syntax-pragmatics interface. Proponents of the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace, 2005; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Sorace and Serratrice, 2009) argue that (external) interfaces…

This article documents a fairly rare kind of interlanguage phenomenon, namely one in which interlanguages exhibit syntactic constructions that are grammatical neither in a learner's native language nor in his or her target language, but are nevertheless typologically attested. The target construction is "wh"-scope marking, a cross-linguistically…