Another Take on the L2 Initial State: Evidence from Comprehension in L2 German

The nature of the initial state in second language acquisition is a much debated but still unresolved issue, due in part to the empirical problem of obtaining production data from L2 learners at very early stages of their development. In an attempt to circumvent this problem, this paper presents evidence from a comprehension-based experiment involving 17 English-speaking learners of German at a beginner's level. The experiment investigates learners' interpretation of ambiguous constituent wh-questions in a picture interpretation task. The results present strong evidence in support of a "full transfer" position (eg, Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994, 1996), which holds that the L1 grammar as a whole constitutes the L2 initial state, while running counter to predictions of the "minimal trees" hypothesis (Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994, 1996), which proposes that early L2 grammars lack functional categories. 4 Tables, 3 Figures, 24 References. Adapted from the source document