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The impetus for this article was Song's (2008) master's thesis. We would like to thank the following University of Hawai'i colleagues whose comments have greatly contributed to this study: William O'Grady (especially), Robert Bley-Vroman, Kamil Ud Deen, Junghee Kim, Soyoung Kim, Hye-Young Kwak, Jee Hyun Ma, and Lourdes Ortega. For helpful discussion and suggestions, we are indebted to Karlos Arregi, Hagit Borer, Laurent Dekydtspotter, Susan Edwards, Kook-Hee Gil, Theo Marinis, Silvina Montrul, Eunjeong Oh, Leticia Pablos, Bernadette Plunkett, Doug Saddy, Roumyana Slabakova, George Tsoulas, James Yoon, Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, and two anonymous SSLA reviewers. Additionally, we are very grateful to our participants (and, in the case of the children, to their parents and teachers) for all their help and cooperation. Our sincere thanks also go to the organizers and participants of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA 2007), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA 2007), and the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 32). The second author is grateful for the assorted support received-- thanks to the efforts of Florence Myles, Martha Young-Scholten, and Lorraine Vincent--while camping out at the Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences (CRiLLS) at Newcastle University during her Visiting Professorship in spring and summer of 2008.
The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH; Bley-Vroman 1989, 1990) has set the agenda for (adult) nonnative language (L2) research within the generative paradigm. At its most basic, the issue is the type of knowledge that adult L2 learners have, specifically whether adult L2 learners (can come to) have the same type of language representations that native speakers do. In his original 10-point argument for the FDH, Bley-Vroman (1990, which was actually written before his 1989 chapter) noted that adult L2 systems virtually never match the target language (TL) but that, in any event, a superficial match to the TL is not sufficient for inferring that the L2 system has necessarily converged on the grammar of the TL.1
Whereas many (if not most) adherents to the FDH and proposals of similar ilk (e.g., Clahsen & Muysken, 1986, 1989; Johnson & Newport, 1989, 1991)2 have focused on differences in attainment between natives and nonnatives, other scholars (e.g., Dekydtspotter, Sprouse, & Thyre, 1999/2000; Hopp, 2005; Kanno,...