Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research

The Bottleneck Hypothesis identifies parts of the grammar that are easier or more difficult to acquire in a second language. It argues that the functional morphology is the bottleneck in L2 acquisition because it bundles a variety of semantic, syntactic and phonological features that affect the meaning and acceptability of the whole sentence. In this chapter, the BH is updated after a decade since its proposal. Current views of Universal Grammar and parametric variation are outlined. Implication