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According to the fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH; Bley-Vroman, 1989, 1990), adult SLA differs from child first language (L1) acquisition in a number of respects. These differences are attributed to the nonavailability of domain-specific language acquisition mechanisms and Universal Grammar (UG) for adult second language (L2) learning, in contrast to child language acquisition. An implication of this approach is that the outcome of SLA, the interlanguage grammar, is not inevitably UG-constrained. However, recognizing that adult L2 learners are often successful in the acquisition of subtle properties underdetermined by the input and not explicitly taught (i.e., assumed to derive from UG), the FDH posits that this kind of knowledge must come from the L1. In other words, the native language exemplifies linguistic universals (by definition) and can be used, in some sense, to reconstruct some aspects of--or build a surrogate for--UG (Bley-Vroman, 1989). Such reconstruction is necessarily restricted to "the most obvious large-scale characteristics of the native language" (Bley-Vroman, 1989, p. 52).
In part as a response to this line of argument, researchers (e.g., White, 1985, 1988) who sought to demonstrate that UG is in fact available (in addition to supporters of the FDH [e.g., Schachter, 1989, 1990], who had the opposite goal in mind) conducted studies in which two conditions were held constant (White, 1990): (a) The phenomenon under investigation constituted a learnability or poverty-of-the-stimulus problem in that it could not be readily induced from the L2 input or learned on the basis of instruction and thus motivated an explanation in terms of UG; (b) the universal principle under investigation did not operate in the L1, or the L1 and L2 differed with respect to parameter settings. Under these two conditions, the FDH predicts failure (i.e., principles of UG will be violated; L2 parameter settings will not be acquired), whereas proponents of UG access predict success (i.e., principles of UG will be observed; L2 parameter settings will be acquired).
Along these lines, constraints on wh-movement have frequently been adopted as a test case to verify whether interlanguage grammars are UG-constrained. Several L2 studies investigated knowledge of the subjacency condition (Chomsky, 1973) in the interlanguage grammars of L2 learners whose L1s leave wh-phrases in their thematic position and thus...