Testing Access to Universal Grammar in L2 Learning: The Pro Drop Parameter
Testing Access to Universal Grammar in L2 Learning: The Pro Drop Parameter

Summary/Abstract: The article looks at one of the topics for research within the field of second language acquisition. In particular, it presents an experiment of speakers of a [+ pro drop] language, Romanian, learning a [- pro drop] language, English, with an analysis of whether the Romanian speakers can reset their pro drop parameter from the L1 value to the L2 value. The experiment was carried out with 27 speakers of 4 main levels, elementary, intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced and it presents evidence to support the hypothesis of the Full Access Full transfer with respect to second language acquisition, i.e. although speakers have access to UG when learning a L2, they cannot reset the parameters completely. The article presents a discussion of the experiment in terms of all the properties related to the pro drop parameter.

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