Older second language learners
Their responses were compared with those of a native speaker control group. Nineteen L1 speakers of Japanese who are highly proficient speakers of English were asked to interpret bi-clausal multiple “wh”-questions in English. The present study investigates this hypothesis in relation to the acquisition of the uninterpretable feature that forces “wh”-movement in interrogatives in English. Interpretable syntactic features, on the other hand, remain available , even those not selected by the L1. In recent Rocket Japanese work by Tsimpli and Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou an explicit claim is made about the nature of end-state grammars in older second language learners: uninterpretable syntactic features that have not been selected during first language acquisition will not be available for L2 grammar construction.
