Archibald’s excellent keynote article argues for the importance of mental representations in modelling the acquisition of a second and third language. In this commentary, I elaborate on his observations concerning the ‘poverty of the stimulus’. I argue that there is a fundamental incommensurability between the input data and the acquired mental representations. Through the lens of the projection problem I show why a rich theory of Universal Grammar (UG) is required to support the acquisition of segmental representations. I then consider the same problem with respect to metrical representations, extending Archibald’s discussion to the Russian lexical accent system. I conclude that Archibald’s program has done much to explore the projection problem in the domain of second and third language acquisition.
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