Comparing a nativist and emergentist approach to the initial stage of SLA: An investigation of Japanese scrambling

The aim of the present study was to evaluate how successfully the UG (nativist) and connectionist (emergentist) frameworks can account for early L2 development, focusing on the acquisition of Japanese word order by adult native English speakers. We conducted a laboratory-based language learning study in which participants were exposed to a semi-artificial language based on Japanese, and we measured incidental learning of scrambling (and head-direction). Although there was some evidence of learning a generalised notion of “free word order”, there was no evidence for accessing the relevant UG parameterised properties. The lack of clustering effects expected as a result of acquiring scrambling led us to conclude that adult SLA is not guided by UG. On the other hand, a connectionist simple recurrent network that was trained and tested on the same structures provided a close approximation to the participants’ data, suggesting that they had acquired a good sense of the statistical structure of the input. Nevertheless, we argue that such a model cannot provide a complete account of learning the word order phenomena that we investigated without being supplemented by symbolic rule-learning mechanisms.