| This thesis addresses the debate about whether adult language learners have access to the principles and parameters of universal grammar (UG) in constructing the grammar of a foreign or second language (L2). A comprehension task investigates the interpretation of English reflexive pronouns by native speakers of Japanese and of Spanish (n = 132), and the interpretation of the Japanese reflexive zibun by native speakers of English and of Chinese (n = 42). The experimental stimuli include single- and bi-clausal sentences, sentences in which the anaphor appears inside an NP with a lexical subject, and sentences which test whether learners require c-commanding antecedents for reflexives. I evaluate the predictions of three hypotheses about the role of universal grammar in L2 acquisition: (A) that UG is unavailable, and that processing strategies or other non-linguistic principles guide L2 acquisition; (B) that UG is available only in the form in which it is instantiated in the learner's native language; (C) that UG is fully available, including the ability to re-set parameters in L2 to UG-sanctioned values not instantiated in the learner's native language. The results show that learners observe constraints defined by Manzini and Wexler's (1987) parameterized version of Principle A of the binding theory, constraints which learners could not have derived solely from inspection of the input data, nor from the treatment of anaphors in their native languages. Thus these results support the proposal that adult learners have access to universal grammar in their interpretations of anaphors in L2. |
