Bilinguals and knowledge of language: a commentary to “Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory”

Abstract

How infant and adult humans learn languages and what this tells us about the various aspects of the language system is currently a central topic in linguistic research, one that more and more includes bilingualism and language attrition in its embrace. Despite the centrality of the problem of language acquisition for Generative Grammar, it is fair to say that other modes of language learning are now entering the arena of discussion, having shown their potential for discovery in Cognitive Science at large. Some aspects of grammatical knowledge that are hard to acquire and yield differences between native and non-native speakers reveal that language learning is indeed a special type of learning, which in turn reveals that knowing more about these entails knowing more about language.