Representational Deficits in SLA: Studies in honor of Roger Hawkins(47 Language Acquisition and Language Disorders)

The main focus of this collection is to explore the question of “representational deficits” in second language acquisition, currently a much-debated topic. The volume is intended as a tribute to Roger Hawkins, a leading scholar in generative second language acquisition, whose research has been devoted to explaining lack of native-like success in terms of representational deficits. The papers in this volume feature a range of studies, all undertaken within a generative linguistic framework, which investigate various properties of L2 grammar bearing on the question of whether or not there are representational deficits in the post-critical-period L2 learners’ grammar. The significance of such deficits, if their existence can be confirmed, is that they provide support for the claim, at least for the type of L2 learner under investigation, that there are insurmountable obstacles to ultimate attainment.

Table of Contents:
1. Dedication; 2. Preface; 3. Acknowledgements; 4. Introduction (by Snape, Neal); 5. Prosodic transfer and the representation of determiners in Turkish-English interlanguage (by Goad, Heather); 6. Exploring Mandarin Chinese speakers' L2 article use (by Snape, Neal); 7. Successful features: Verb raising and adverbs in L2 acquisition under an Organic Grammar approach (by Vainikka, Anne); 8. Non-permanent representational deficit and apparent target-likeness in second language: Evidence from wh-words used as universal quantifiers in English and Japanese speakers' L2 Chinese (by Yuan, Boping); 9. Acquisition of the local binding characteristics of English reflexives and the obligatory status of English objects by Chinese-speaking learners (by Lin, Jiang); 10. Selective deficits at the syntax-discourse interface: evidence from the CEDEL2 corpus (by Lozano, Cristobal); 11. Clitic doubling and clitic left dislocation in Spanish and Greek L2 grammars (by Parodi, Teresa); 12. Aspect and the Interpretation of Motion Verbs in L2 Greek (by Tsimpli, Ianthi Maria); 13. Associating meaning to form in advanced L2 speakers: An investigation into the acquisition of the English present simple and present progressive (by Liszka, Sarah Ann); 14. Name index; 15. Subject index

Review :
Overall, however, this is serious work on a serious subject, and anyone interested in the question of failure to converge on the target grammar would do well to take a look at it. This book is an excellent example of how Roger Hawkins’s work has influenced the second language acquisition (SLA) field. The nine chapters that comprise the volume cover different linguistic interfaces (syntax-phonology, syntax-morphology, syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics) and an interesting array of first and second language combinations. They are all solidly grounded in empirical work and focus on the much-debated issue of representational deficits in SLA. I believe the book makes a timely contribution to the field and will be read with great interest by both researchers and advanced graduate students. This is an excellent volume compiling current research studies that explore the L2 acquisition of a variety of morpho-syntactic properties by making reference to the question of UG access and the transfer of L1-based grammatical representation into the L2. The volume will make a unique and important contribution to our understanding of the nature of deficits observed in L2 acquisition. Failure to learn syntactic properties of an L2 at advanced levels of proficiency presents acquisition theories with a conundrum. The papers in this volume address one account of this failure: representational deficits. Rich in data, presenting many different learning problems, of L1-L2 pairs, and well-articulated theoretical solutions, they make a worthy tribute to Roger Hawkins’s significant contributions to second language research.