Interand intra-population consistency: a comment on Kanno (1998)

Abstract

An article in the last Second Language Research (Kanno, 1998) describes studies in which American adult learners of Japanese in Hawai’i are tested for their knowledge of two UG principles: the Empty Category Principle and the Overt Pronoun Constraint.Kanno shows that native-like knowledge on the part of a learner of the workings of the one principle will not necessarily guarantee that the same individual will have knowledge of the other principle at the same point in time. Therefore, learners are not ‘laterally consistent’. Furthermore, where learners do demonstrate knowledge of a principle at Time 1, they may not do so at Time 2. Thus, says Kanno, there is also a problem of ‘longitudinal consistency’.However, in our comment on Kanno’s paper, we suggest that another form of ‘lateral inconsistency’, which arises from a failure to replicate Kanno’s findings for the ECP in another population of adult learners, constitutes a further muddying of the waters in the UG accessibility debate.

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