26:T4aa,

Twenty-seven English-speaking learners of Chinese (the experimental groups) and 20 native speakers of Chinese (the control group) participated in a study that investigated second language learners' knowledge of reconstruction (NP and predicate fronted sentences with ziji ‘self’) in Chinese. Results of a sentence interpretation task indicate that English-speaking learners of Chinese had knowledge of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji inside a moved predicate, and lack of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji inside a moved NP, although such information is not directly available in English. While the experiment produced evidence that they appeared to have access to Universal Grammar, English-speaking learners of Chinese bound ziji in non-movement sentences to an embedded subject, indicating that they mapped the narrower setting of reflexives in English onto a wider parameter setting of ziji in Chinese.

27:T4e8,

The use of grammaticality and metalinguistic judgement tests in second language acquisition (SLA) research has been the subject of considerable scrutiny over the past decade (see, for example, Chaudron, 1983; Birdsong, 1989; Ellis, 1991; Cowan and Hatasa, 1994; Gass, 1994; Davies and Kaplan, 1998).Grammaticality judgement (GJ) test data in research design are used to make inferences about the syntactic structures and rules that constitute learners’ linguistic competence, in the Chomskian sense of the word. One criticism levelled at the use of this type of test, however, is that they are not reliable measures of linguistic competence.

The present study compared GJ test data with dehydrated sentence (DS) test data, an assessment tool commonly used in the L2 (second language) classroom. Data were collected from three levels (second, fourth and sixth semester) of adult L2 learners of Spanish about verb movement (Vmovement). The results from the comparison of the two tests indicated that GJ data are reliable measures of linguistic knowledge.

28:T4df,

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.

29:T965,