Commentary on Clahsen and Felser

In this article, the authors lay out an impressive body of evidence that supports two main claims. First, they favor the continuity hypothesis, according to which children's parsing mechanisms are essentially the same as adults'. Parsing strategies change little over time, and those changes that occur are attributed to differences in lexical processing efficiency and working memory capacity. Second, they suggest that there are substantial differences in the parsing strategies adopted by native speakers and adult learners of second languages.