Acquisition at the interface: The L2 acquisition of pronominal cliticization in German

Scovel (1969) claims that the persistence of errors (fossilization) in the second language acquisition of phonology by adult learners is inevitable. An examination of the nature of persistent phonological errors shows whether this is due to adults' inability to access Universal Grammar (UG).; The acquisition of pronominal cliticization in German by advanced learners from American English, Korean, Spanish and Turkish backgrounds is investigated to determine the relationship of these learners' problems to their acquisition of syllable structure, rhythmic structure and syntactically conditioned phonological phenomena. It is hypothesized that if adults have access to the principles of UG, but not to the parameters, they will acquire syllable structure, but not rhythmic structure or syntactic structure.; The phonological attachment of the German clitics to a host on their left results in either a syllable-final consonant cluster or a single, non-branching mora dominating a reduced, centralized vowel or syllabic sonorant consonant. The syntactic adjunction of the clitics is to COMP (immediately following a verb or complementizer).; Results from an elicited imitation task show that English speakers predictably exhibit no problems with the acquisition of the equally complex German syllable structure. The Korean, Spanish and Turkish learners also exhibit few problems with syllable structure, supporting the claim that adults have access to the phonological principles of UG. The Spanish data reveal that these learners are unable to reset their rhythmic parameter from syllable-timed to stress-timed. However, the data from the other learners suggest all learners have difficulty setting this parameter. Findings from the first language acquisition of stress-timed languages indicate that the rhythmic parameter is set quite late.; The syntactic conditions on cliticization are not acquired by any of the speakers. While the Americans appear to transfer their more general pronominal cliticization from English, their patterns of cliticization resemble those for the other learners in that all learners cliticize more often to lexical rather than functional elements. These results echo previous findings pointing to persistent problems for second language learners with functional categories, presumably connected to lack of access to the syntactic parameters of UG.