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The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy: Lame Duck or Dead Duck in Theories of SLA?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2007

Roger Hawkins
Roger Hawkins
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Extract

The use of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) as an explanation for the use, interpretation, or both of relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) speakers is one of the earliest examples of an attempt to offer a principled hypothesis about L2 development. Its explicit claims have allowed empirical testing that has produced important counterexamples, including the results of the studies reported in this special issue, which suggest that the hierarchy is not applicable to the SLA of languages like Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. A weak version of the hypothesis that applies only to languages in which RCs express head-complement dependencies (i.e., postnominal relatives) is just as problematic. I suggest here that the time has come to consign this hierarchy to the history of SLA research and focus on other kinds of question about L2 speakers' knowledge of RCs.

Type
COMMENTARY
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 345 - 349
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

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