Property-by-property acquisition of a second language: What transfers,under what conditions,and how does recovery from transfer proceed?

Abstract

This commentary discusses the recent keynote article in Second Language Research by Westergaard (2021), which extends the Micro-cue Model to second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary comments on such questions as: What makes a given property easy or hard to acquire? How do learners determine similarity? What exactly is the role of UG, on a non-parametric view? And what explains the differences between L1 and L2/subsequent acquisition?

Keywords

parameters micro-cues L1-transfer

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