L2 Acquisition of Scope: Testing the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis

The status of Universal Grammar (UG) in second language (L2) acquisition has long been debated. At one extreme, there are claims arguing that interlanguages are defective, and suffer from global or local impairment (e.g. Clahsen & Hong 1995; Beck 1998). At the other extreme are approaches that maintain that second language acquirers have full access to UG (e.g. Flynn & Martohardjono 1994; Schwartz & Sprouse 1996). Specific hypotheses on both sides differ with respect to the role they assign to the first language (L1). One hypothesis, the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis (FTFA) (e.g. Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996; White 1989, 1990/1991), maintains that the L1 grammar, including L1 parameter settings, constitutes the initial state of L2 acquisition (full transfer), but that L2 learners have full access to UG at all times during the acquisition process (full access), and thus that parameter resetting is usually possible. This paper is an attempt to test this hypothesis, investigating the L2 acquisition of a semantic parameter that is set to one value in English and another one in Turkish. The relevant structure is quantificational scope: The two languages are in a subset-superset relationship with respect to the scopal interpretations they allow for sentences that involve negation and numeral quantifiers such as two, with Turkish being the subset and English being the superset language. Therefore, given L1s and L2s like English and Turkish, in accordance with the FTFA, we hypothesize that there will be directional differences in eventual success in acquiring L2 scope facts. Our results show that this hypothesis is actually borne out: L1 Turkish learners of L2 English can acquire the relevant structure on the basis of positive evidence and behave like native English speakers. L1 English learners of L2 Turkish, on the other hand, are unable to lose the additional interpretation their grammar allows, for there is no positive evidence to show that the relevant interpretation is disallowed in Turkish. Therefore, their grammar diverges from that of the target language, though is still one that is constrained by UG. The present paper differs, in significant ways, from previous research testing semantic parameters (e.g. Dekydtspotter, Sprouse, & Anderson 1997; Dekydtspotter, Sprouse, & Swanson 2001; Dekydtspotter & Sprouse 2001; Slabakova 2005, 2006). First, L2 input contains evidence only of different interpretations, not of structures, and without any overt syntactic or morphological differences/cues accompanied. Second, the relevant property is not in any known relationship with any other linguistic properties (unlike e.g. Slabakova 2005, 2006), and thus its possible acquisition cannot be attributed to the knowledge of some parametrically related syntactic evidence (i.e. not triggered by the clustering of parametrically related properties). Therefore, it poses a true poverty of the stimulus (POS) challenge for learners. The paper is organized in the following way: Section 2 outlines the facts for English, and summarizes the linguistic theory and findings of the L1 acquisition literature with respect to the relevant construction. Section 3 compares the English data with those of Turkish, and sketches the predictions of this for L2 learners. Section 4 describes our experiment designed to test these predictions and summarizes its results. Finally, section 5 provides a discussion and section 6 concludes the paper.