Adult Accessibility to L2 Representational Features: Evidence from the Spanish DP.

For over a decade the Minimalist Program (MP, Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) has revolutionized both our understanding of the architecture of linguistic systems as well as how these systems come to be acquired. According to current MP assumptions, parameter values obtain as a consequence of crosslinguistic differences in formal feature and functional category composition. Universal Grammar (UG) purportedly provides a superset of formal features and functional categories to all human beings. The learning task of a child, therefore, involves choosing which functional categories and formal features apply to his native language in light of the primary linguistic data at his disposal during the course of grammatical development. Within such a conceptualization of the mental constitution of linguistic knowledge, the instantiation (or lack thereof) of particular features is seen on the surface as crosslinguistic typological differences, otherwise known as parametric differences. For example, languages that lack an uninterpretable +wh feature will not have +wh movement, resulting in so-called wh-in situ languages such as Chinese (and, as a result, principles such as Subjacency will not pertain to these languages) while languages such as English whose input provides evidence of a +wh feature has, as a syntactic consequence, obligatory +wh movement and must respect Subjacency conditions (see Hawkins and Hattori 2006). The learning task of the adult L2 learner is not, a priori, unlike that of the L1 child. That is to say, in order for an adult learner to converge on the target representation of any given L2, he must have access to the features of UG that remained unspecified during the course of L1 acquisition. However, there are many more variables involved in adult language learning, not the least of which is the fact that the initial state of acquisition is different than that of the child. It is reasonable to suppose that L1 transfer occurs (consult Epstein, Flynn and Martohardjono 1996, 1998 for an alternative view), and therefore, adult language acquisition does not begin with the tabula rasa with which L1 acquisition commences. Couched within MP notions, contemporary theorizing within generative second language acquisition (L2A) has been able to offer more fine-grained proposals over the last decade that are in a better position to adequately describe and explain the process and outcomes of adult language acquisition. One of several central questions in the current research program of generative L2A involves the continued role of UG after the so-called critical period and how answering this query can shed some light on the asymmetrical patterns of preand post-critical period language acquisition. Some have argued that UG, in the sense that UG contains a superset of all possible formal grammatical features, is no longer available in the same way to adult language learners. Proponents of the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (RDH) claim that [some] features not instantiated in the L1 are no longer available to adult learners and thus L2 variability is represented within the narrow syntax (Beck 1998; Hawkins and Chan 1997; Franceschina 2001; Hawkins and Franceschina 2004; Hawkins and Hattori 2006; Tsimpli and Mastropavlou 2008; Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou 2007). If true, this