This paper reports on studies of second language acquisition in two domains, phonology and syntax. The phenomena investigated were the acquisition by native speakers of Hindi, Japanese, and Korean of two areas of English: in phonology, the mastery of particular syllable onset clusters, and in syntax, the acquisition of the binding patterns of reflexive anaphors. Both these areas are ones for which multi-valued parameters have been posited to account for the range of variation across natural languages. The paper presents evidence that acquisition in these two areas is quite similar: at a certain stage of acquisition learners seem to arrive at a parameter setting that is midway between the native and the target language settings. This effect occurs both when the target language employs a less marked setting than the native language and when the target language setting is more marked than that of the native language.

Reversal or reduction of normal structural cerebral asymmetries may be related to the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, but this relationship remains controversial. We review the literature and describe a further study designed to detect whether anomalous asymmetries are present early in the illness (at the first episode), whether they predict deficits in language processing, and whether they may be related to a genetic predisposition for schizophrenia. Asymmetries of brain widths and segments of the sylvian fissure were assessed in a magnetic resonance imaging study of 87 patients with a first episode of schizophrenia and 52 normal controls. These asymmetries were correlated with specific measures of language processing, memory, and hand skill. An independent group of 14 pairs of siblings with schizophrenia were also evaluated for evidence of heritability to cerebral asymmetries. Width asymmetries were reduced in patients compared with controls in the posterior (p = 0.02) and occipital (p = 0.05) regions. Brain horizontal length, on the other hand, was significantly more asymmetrical in patients (left > right; p = 0.04). For sylvian fissure measurements, asymmetries in controls (left > right) were greatest for the horizontal component; this asymmetry tended to detect differences in patients by comparison with controls (p < 0.06). In a range of tests of language and memory, few significant correlations between performance and cerebral asymmetries were detected either in patients or controls, although patients consistently scored poorer than controls in the majority of tests. In 14 pairs of psychotic siblings, within-pair correlations for the horizontal sylvian fissure asymmetry were significantly greater than between-pair correlations. These findings are consistent with the early presence (possibly genetic) of anomalous cerebral asymmetry. However, the functional correlates of reduced asymmetry remain obscure.

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