This article is a defence of the Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA) model. FT/FA hypothesizes that the initial state of L2 acquisition is the final state of L1 acquisition (Full Transfer) and that failure to assign a representation to input data will force subsequent restructurings, drawing from options of UG (Full Access). We illustrate the FT/FA model by reviewing our analysis of the developmental Turkish-German Interlanguage data of Schwartz and Sprouse (1994) and then turn to other data that similarly receive straightforward accounts under FT/FA. We also consider two other competing hypotheses, both of which accept Full Access but not Full Transfer: the Minimal Trees hypothesis (no transfer of functional categories) of Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994; 1996) and the Weak Transfer hypothesis (no transfer of the values associated with functional categories) of Eubank (1993/94). We provide an example of (extremely robust) L2 acquisition data that highlight the inadequacy of the Minimal Trees hypothesis in regard to stages of Interlanguage subsequent to the L2 initial state. As for Weak Transfer, we show that the morphosyntactic empirical foundations which drive the entire approach are flawed; hence the Weak Transfer hypothesis remains without motivation. Finally, we consider several conceptual issues relating to transfer. These all argue that the FT/FA model provides the most coherent picture of the L2 initial cognitive state. In short, FT/FA embodies the most suitable programme for understanding comparative Interlanguage development.

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It is well known that adult US-English-speaking learners of French experience difficulties acquiring high /y/–/u/ and mid /œ/–/ɔ/ front vs. back rounded vowel contrasts in French. This study examines the acquisition of these French vowel contrasts at two levels: phonetic categorization and lexical representations. An ABX categorization task (for details, see Section IV) revealed that both advanced and intermediate learners categorized /œ/ vs. /ɔ/ and /y/ vs. /u/ differently from native speakers of French, although performance on the /y/–/u/ contrast was more accurate than on the /œ/–/ɔ/ contrast in all contexts. On a lexical decision task with repetition priming, advanced learners and native speakers produced no (spurious) response time (RT) facilitations for /y/–/u/ and /œ/–/ɔ/ minimal pairs; however, in intermediate learners, the decision for a word containing /y/ was speeded by hearing an otherwise identical word containing /u/ (and vice versa), suggesting that /u/ and /y/ are not distinguished in lexical representations. Thus, while it appears that advanced learners encoded the /y/–/u/ and /œ/–/ɔ/ contrasts in the phonological representations of lexical items, they gained no significant benefit on the categorization task. This dissociation between phonological representations and phonetic categorization challenges common assumptions about their relationship and supports a novel approach we label ‘direct mapping from acoustics to phonology’ (DMAP).

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This study addresses the issue of second language (L2) epistemology assuming Chomsky’s (1995) discussion of the place of Universal Grammar (UG) in mental design: i.e., the optimal solution to the mental design problem for language in the sense of Minimalist theory. Aspects of interpretation of continuous and discontinuous interrogatives of the form qui de AP (‘who (of) AP’) in first language and L2 acquisition appear to follow from principles of economy in mental design and language-dependent hypotheses. We argue that such knowledge is guaranteed to arise in the absence of relevant input only if a grammar is a realization of language-dependent hypotheses and basic principles of grammar, but crucially not if it consists of a set of (derivative) grammatical theorems not constrained by principles of optimal design.