Beyond maturation

This commentary on Jurgen M. Meisel's paper in this issue of Zeitschrift fur Sprachwissenschaft in support of Robert Bley-Vroman's (1990 & to appear) fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH) focuses on five issues: (1) does the "surrogate solution" proposed by Meisel adequately account for the learnability problem if universal grammar is no longer accessible to older second language learners? (2) the need for more than universal grammar in second language learning, (3) the status of structure dependency principle to adult second language learners, (4) evidence supporting the null hypothesis concerning both verb placement & subject-verb agreement for children acquiring German as an early second language, & (5) the contribution of research in early (simultaneous) bilingualism & early second language acquisition to studies of first language acquisition & maturation. Z. Dubiel