POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS AND UG IN JAPANESE L2 ACQUISITION: A RESPONSE TO SHEEN (2000) *
Heather Marsden · 2002
Kanno (1997, 1998) investigated whether native English-speaking learners of Japanese have access to UG, as manifest in the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC)—a UG mechanism that prevents overt pronouns in Japanese from having a bound variable interpretation. The facts subsumed by the OPC are underdetermined by the input, hence the acquisition of these facts represents a poverty of the stimulus problem. Kanno’s results showed that her L2 learner subjects were able to achieve nativelike performance on sentences instantiating the OPC. Kanno thus concluded that UG must be available in adult L2 acquisition. Sheen (2000) disputes this conclusion, appealing to a general problem-solving, non-UG account of Kanno’s results. The present paper argues against Sheen’s general problem-solving account. 1.