Developmental Stages in Receptive Grammar Acquisition: A Processability Theory Account

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Developmental stages in receptive grammar acquisition: A Processability

Theory account
Article in Second language Research · May 2015

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Theory account
Aafke Buyl and Alex Housen

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Abstract
This study takes a new look at the topic of developmental stages in the second language (L2)
acquisition of morphosyntax by analysing receptive learner data, a language mode that has
hitherto received very little attention within this strand of research (for a recent and rare study,
see Spinner, 2013). Looking at both the receptive and productive side of grammar acquisition,
however, is necessary for a better understanding of developmental systematicity and of the
relationship between receptive and productive grammar acquisition more widely, as well as
for the construction of a comprehensive theory of second language acquisition (SLA). In the
present exploratory study, the receptive acquisition of L2 English grammar knowledge is studied
cross-sectionally within a Processability Theory (PT) framework (Pienemann, 1998, 2005b), a
theory of L2 grammar acquisition which makes explicit predictions about the order in which L2
learners learn to productively process different morphosyntactic phenomena. Participants are
72 francophone beginning child L2 learners (age 6–9) acquiring English in an immersion program.
The learners’ ability to process six morphosyntactic phenomena situated at extreme ends of the
developmental hierarchy proposed by PT was tested by means of the ELIAS Grammar Test, a
picture selection task. Overall, the developmental orders obtained through implicational scaling
for the six target phenomena agreed with PT’s predictions, suggesting that similar mechanisms
underlie the acquisition of receptive and productive L2 grammar processing skills.
Keywords
developmental stages, English, grammar, L2 grammar, L2 processing, morphology, Processability
Theory, second language acquisition, receptive grammar
Corresponding author:
Aafke Buyl, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, LW-TALK, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussel, Belgium.
Email: aafke.buyl@vub.ac.be
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2 Second Language Research
I Introduction
Research conducted since the 1960s suggests that second language (L2) learners acquire
certain morphosyntactic phenomena of the target language in a relatively fixed order and
that learners also go through similar stages within their interlanguage development of
specific grammatical structures (e.g. negation). The umbrella terms used to denote these
two phenomena are ‘orders’ and ‘sequences’ of acquisition, respectively (Ellis, 2008;
Ortega, 2009). Within the line of research that deals with these developmental phenom-
ena, considerable effort has been invested in testing the imperviousness of the various
stages of acquisition to factors such as age of acquisition, first language (L1) background
and learning context as well as in exploring the cross-linguistic validity of and possible
driving forces behind any observed developmental consistencies. Major (and ongoing)
debates have also revolved around methodological issues such as the appropriate meth-
odology for establishing staged development (e.g. group scores versus implicational
scaling) and the operationalization of the concept of ‘acquisition’ (e.g. in terms of native-
like performance versus emergence).
A rarely made observation concerning the otherwise very diverse body of research on
L2 developmental stages is that the vast majority of studies have looked only at produc-
tive learner data, leaving receptive learner data out of the equation. By receptive learner
data, we here refer to data that have been obtained through a ‘receptive grammar task’,
e.g. grammaticality judgement tasks, comprehension tasks such as picture selection
tasks, or psycholinguistic online processing tasks such as self-paced reading tasks or
tasks involving eye-tracking. The assumption is that these tasks can inform us about
learners’ ability to process L2 morphosyntax during input processing. This is opposed to
productive learner data, which tells us something about their ability to process grammar
for language production. (See also the discussion below about the relationship between
grammar processing in these two language modes.)
To our knowledge, only three studies to date (Keatinge and Keßler, 2009; Larsen-
Freeman, 2002; Spinner, 2013) have been explicitly devoted to the receptive side of L2
grammar acquisition. Yet looking at receptive language data is useful, and even neces-
sary, for two reasons. First, it may benefit our understanding of developmental stages in
general by providing additional evidence for developmental systematicity from a richer
pool of language data and by allowing us to look at the various prevailing conceptualiza-
tions of and explanations for developmental stages in a new and more informed light.
Indeed, it can be reasonably argued that receptive learner data are crucial for a truly
comprehensive understanding of developmental stages in SLA.
A second reason for looking at receptive learner data is the potential relevance of the
findings for the field of SLA more widely. One of the ultimate aims of SLA is to arrive
at a comprehensive theory of L2 grammar acquisition. Such a theory must also include
an explicit view on concepts such as grammar knowledge (as a ‘mental system’), recep-
tive grammar processing and productive grammar processing, and on the relationship
between them. Current opinions on these issues still vary in different respects. For exam-
ple, L1 researchers currently debate whether receptive and productive grammar process-
ing are, as per the traditional view, ‘subserved by distinct, dedicated processing resources,
which presumably do not have much more in common than access to the same

Buyl and Housen 3
declarative resources: the lexicon and the grammar’ (Kempen et al., 2011: 347) or
whether, despite the different direction of processing (from meaning to message and vice
versa), receptive and productive grammar processing involve ‘shared processing
resources’ (as argued by Kempen et al., 2011: 348) and common ‘neurobiological sys-
tems’ (as argued by Segaert et al. 2012: 1). These, and other, related issues, also still
stand open to debate in SLA research. A comparative investigation of developmental
systematicity in receptive versus productive L2 grammar acquisition can contribute to
this debate by shedding light on the relationship between receptive and productive gram-
mar acquisition.
It should be emphasized that the two rationales for studying receptive learner data just
outlined serve merely as the underlying impetus and overarching research questions of
the present study. Given the novelty of this research, the aim of the present article is to
address these questions in an exploratory manner by identifying methodological issues
and exploring possible directions for future research. Concretely, the present study will
look at developmental stages in receptive grammar acquisition within the framework of
Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998, 2005b), a psycholinguistic theory of L2
grammar acquisition that offers an account of the stages learners go through in learning
to process L2 morphosyntactic structures. PT assumes that grammar knowledge consists
of mental representations (i.e. a mental grammar) and of processing skills which operate
on, and hence are separate from, the mental grammar. PT argues that it is the order in
which productive processing skills are acquired which causes the developmental stages
observed in learner production data. Examining whether the mechanisms posited by PT
to govern the development of productive grammar processing skills also apply to the
development of receptive grammar processing skills not only enhances our insight into
developmental stages but also informs us whether receptive and productive processing
are governed by similar mechanisms.
In the remainder of this article we will outline the mechanisms of PT and present
previous research on receptive and productive grammar acquisition, followed by an
empirical study on the development of receptive grammar knowledge by francophone
child learners of English as an L2.
II Theoretical framework: Processability Theory

1 Basic mechanisms
Processability Theory (Pienemann, 2005b; Pienemann and Keßler, 2011) aims to offer a
cross-linguistically applicable and psycholinguistically plausible explanation for the stages
and sequences learners go through in learning to produce morphosyntactic structures of the
target L2. The fundamental tenet underlying PT is that language acquisition is constrained
by the architecture of human language processing: ‘learners can acquire only those linguis-
tic forms and functions which he or she can process’ (Pienemann, 2011b: 27). PT derives
its psycholinguistic plausibility from the fact that its predictions are grounded in the pro-
cessing mechanisms – called ‘processing procedures’ (see below) – of Levelt’s (1989) and
Kempen and Hoenkamp’s (1987) psycholinguistic models of speech production. In addi-
tion, PT formally represents grammar within the specific formalism of Lexical-Functional
Grammar (LFG; Bresnan, 1982; Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982), a cross-linguistically

applicable theory of grammar. LFG also provides PT with its central mechanism of ‘feature
unification’ (i.e. the unification of grammatical information between different sentence
constituents, as in subject–verb agreement), a mechanism that LFG also shares with
Levelt’s and Kempen and Hoenkamp’s speech production models.
Based on the above models, PT defines productive grammar processing along the fol-
lowing tenets. First, in order to ensure ‘feature unification’, grammatical information has
to be stored in a grammatical memory store and called up at later points in the language
generation process. Depending on the type of feature unification, this process is executed
by one of five processing procedures:
1. The lemma procedure activates the lexical items.

2. The category procedure accesses the categorical information associated with the
activated lemmas.
3. The phrasal procedure builds phrases by unifying information between constitu-
ents of the same phrase.
4. The S-procedure exchanges information between phrases in a sentence and
accesses the target word order rules.
5. The subordinate clause procedure or S'-clause procedure operates on subordinate
clauses, allowing learners to produce target-like word orders which are specific
to such clauses.
These five procedures are executed in an implicational order, because every procedure
builds on the output of the previous one.
Second, to account for developmental stages, PT holds that the above five processing
procedures are acquired by L2 learners in the same implicational order as that in which
they are executed in the course of the speech production process. In other words, PT
predicts a basic developmental chronology – or ‘Processability Hierarchy’ – that consists
of five hierarchically ranked developmental stages, each of which is characterized by the
acquisition of one of the five processing procedures outlined above. Hence, the gram-
matical phenomena that require one of these processing procedures become available to
all L2 learners in the same order. While the processing mechanisms in the Processability
Hierarchy are claimed to be universal, the resulting developmental schedules (i.e. which
grammatical structures arise at each stage) are language-specific.
Third, an important note for this study is that PT defines acquisition not in terms of
native-like performance, as is often the case in SLA, but in terms of ‘emergence’.
Pienemann (1998) defines emergence as the ‘first systematic use’ (p. 138) of a structure
and explains that ‘from a speech processing point of view, emergence can be understood
as the point in time at which certain skills have, in principle, been attained or at which
certain operations can, in principle, be carried out’ (p. 138). This means that learners’
production is clearly distinct from formulaic sequences and memorized chunks, but may
not yet have reached the accuracy-based criteria commonly set in many SLA studies to
qualify for ‘native-like acquisition’, i.e. anywhere between 60% (e.g. Vainikka and
Young-Scholten, 1994) and 90% (Dulay and Burt, 1974) correct use in obligatory con-
texts. The operationalization of emergence for the receptive side of grammar acquisition
is one of the main methodological challenges in the study of developmental stages in
receptive grammar acquisition, and one which will be explored in the present study.

Buyl and Housen 5
Table 1. Developmental stages in English.
Stage Processing procedure Examples

1 word/lemma single words; formulae (How are you?)
2 category procedure SVO word order (*he live here)
past -ed (she play-ed, *he go-ed)
plural -s (cats)
possessive -’s (Pat’s cat)
3 phrasal procedure plural agreement (two cats)
4 VP-procedure tense agreement (I have seen you)
5 S-procedure subject–verb agreement (he eats)
6 subordinate-clause procedure ‘cancel inversion’ (I wonder where he is)
Source. Adapted from Pienemann, 2005a, 2011a: 51, 63.
As a theory of L2 grammar acquisition, PT is noteworthy for making explicit and

falsifiable predictions (Jordan, 2004), which (a) concern both morphology and syntax,
(b) involve both orders and sequences of acquisition, and (c) which are cross-linguisti-
cally valid. This makes PT more comprehensive in scope than many other accounts of
developmental stages. Early morpheme order studies (e.g. Dulay and Burt, 1974; Larsen-
Freeman, 1975), for example, were mainly restricted to a limited set of English mor-
phemes and lacked a clear theoretical framework, while later, more theoretically-driven
approaches were often limited in their cross-linguistic applicability and/or morphosyn-
tactic scope (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Hyltenstam, 1984; Nicholas, 1984).
Empirical support for PT, finally, has come from both child and adult learners of dif-
ferent L2s (e.g. Arabic, German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish) and from different L1 back-
grounds (e.g. Al Shatter, 2008; Baten, 2011; Di Biase and Kawaguchi, 2002; Håkansson,
2001; Håkansson et al., 2002; Rahkonen and Håkansson, 2008). The present study
focuses on the acquisition of L2 English by French-speaking children.
2 Developmental stages in L2 English

Recent versions of PT (Pienemann, 2005b, 2011a) distinguish six stages for the develop-
ment of grammar in English (Table 1). Stages 1–3 and 5–6 in English correspond to the
five processing procedures outlined in the previous section. Stage 4 is a more recent
addition to the Processability Hierarchy, which has been added in response to empirical
findings. These stages account for the acquisition of a large number of English gram-
matical structures, including the following:
1. morpheme markings such as past tense -ed, plural -s marking and possessive -’s,
which do not involve any feature unification (category procedure; Stage 2);
2. number agreement between modifiers and nouns, which involves within-phrasal
feature unification (phrasal procedure; Stage 3);
3. ‘tense agreement’, as in agreement between auxiliary have + past participle;
(Pienemann, 2005a) (VP procedure; Stage 4);

4. structures such as subject–verb agreement, which involves between-phrasal uni-

fication of person and number (S-procedure; Stage 5); and
5. sub-clausal word order phenomena such as the cancellation of inversion in indi-
rect questions (termed ‘Cancel Inversion’) (subclause procedure; Stage 6).
The developmental hierarchy for English has been supported by empirical evidence from
English L2 learners with L1 backgrounds as typologically diverse as, for example,
Japanese (Sakai, 2008) and German (Pienemann, 2005b).
3 ‘Feature unification’, ‘processing procedures’ and receptive grammar

acquisition
As mentioned earlier, the basic principles of PT are grounded in Levelt’s Model of
Speech Production and in Kempen and Hoenkamp’s Incremental Procedural Grammar.
This makes PT ‘in actuality a theory of language production’ (Ellis, 2008: 461; emphasis
ours). Pienemann (1998) himself writes that ‘it is clear that comprehension and produc-
tion are not mirror images of each other’ (p. 52),1 and limits the scope of PT to productive
grammar acquisition. The question addressed in this article, then, is whether the implica-
tionally ordered processing procedures also account for the development of receptive
grammar acquisition.
Relevant research to consider in this context is psycholinguistic research on the pro-
cessing of grammatical agreement in L1 speakers and L2 learners. First, studies on L1
processing have suggested that agreement processing is a psychologically real process in
receptive grammar processing. Even though listeners, unlike speakers, can circumvent
grammatical parsing by relying on non-grammatical ((i.e. on lexical and semantic, e.g.
probabilistic, information) information Fernández and Cairns, 2011; Garman, 1990; Van
Gompel and Pickering, 2007), native speakers will still access and process grammatical
information in linguistic input. Second, research that explicitly compares the effect of L2
proficiency on the processing of different types of agreement is still rare, but the few
available studies suggest that, while highly advanced L2 learners may show native-like
processing patterns, beginning and intermediate learners show varying levels of process-
ing skills, depending not only on their proficiency level but also on the grammatical
feature that is being investigated (Chondrogianni and Marinis, 2012; Hopp, 2010;
Sagarra and Herschensohn, 2010). A relevant question, then, is what causes certain fea-
tures to be more difficult to process than others.
Although the notion of agreement in these studies is somewhat more narrow than the
feature unification that takes place at the various stages of PT, there are enough similari-
ties to argue that this psycholinguistic evidence, especially the fact that certain features
are more difficult to process than others, warrants an investigation of the staged develop-
ment of processing skills within a PT framework.
III Previous research on developmental stages in

receptive grammar acquisition
Only a limited number of studies to date have looked at developmental stages in recep-
tive L2 grammar acquisition. In an early morpheme acquisition study, Larsen-Freeman

Buyl and Housen 7
(1975) examined adult L2 learners’ productive and receptive knowledge of 10 English

morphemes that were typically investigated in morpheme acquisition research of the
time. The test battery consisted of three L2 production tasks (a blank-filling exercise,
the Bilingual Syntax Measure and a sentence repetition task) and two receptive tasks
(aural and written picture matching tasks). Results showed that only the rank orders of
the reading and writing tasks, on the one hand, and of the speaking and listening tasks,
on the other hand, correlated. These results later led Larsen-Freeman to emphasize that
one should not ‘assume an isomorphism between comprehension and production’
(Larsen-Freeman, 2002: 283) in L2 development. Although Larsen-Freeman’s study is
noteworthy for being the first to examine the developmental patterns in receptive L2
grammar acquisition, it shared a number of problems with other morpheme studies of
the time (see Ellis, 2008), including its use of accuracy rank orders based on group data,
a method that masks individual variation, and which is thus ill suited for investigating
developmental stages.
In more recent years, only two empirical studies that we know of have explicitly
investigated developmental stages in receptive L2 grammar acquisition. Keatinge and
Keßler (2009) examined 10 German-speaking adolescents’ receptive and productive
knowledge of the passive voice in L2 English within a PT framework. They write that,
according to PT, ‘perception of the passive voice is constrained by processing proce-
dures’, but they assume that ‘perception does not require productive processing skills of
this structure’ (p. 73). Despite the importance of the relationship between receptive and
productive processing, a more detailed discussion of these assumptions is not provided.
On this basis, then, these authors hypothesized that learners will start to comprehend the
passive voice before or at the same time as they begin to produce interlanguage variants
of the passive (e.g. *Banana eat by monkey). L2 learners’ productive knowledge of the
passive voice was tested using a number of elicitation tasks, namely Tomlin’s (1995)
Fish Film, two sentence completion tasks, and a story telling task. Learners’ receptive
knowledge of the passive was assessed by a semantic decision task based on the Fish
Film, whereby learners had to match passive and active sentences to one of two pictures.
Data analysis revealed that the learners who were not yet able to produce (pseudo-)pas-
sives had a score of either 0% or 10% on the comprehension task, while all learners
(except one) that were able to produce (pseudo-)passives had scores of 70% or higher on
the comprehension task. Keatinge and Keßler (2009) claim that their data support the
applicability of PT to receptive grammar acquisition, but this conclusion seems prema-
ture given that the authors looked at one structure only.
The most recent venture into receptive developmental stages was undertaken by
Spinner (2013). In this study, receptive language data were collected using two aural
grammaticality judgement tests (GJTs) - one being a revised version of the other. The
two GJTs tested 15 English structures representing Stages 2 through 6 in the PT
Processability Hierarchy for L2 English. The tests included both morphological and syn-
tactic structures. Participants included 51 learners of English, ranging from beginner to
advanced and with various L1 backgrounds. While results from a production task con-
firmed PT, the GJT data did not reveal any developmental systematicity, suggesting
either that receptive grammar acquisition is not governed by PT, or that other factors (e.g.
the nature of the task) had prevented any developmental systematicity from becoming
visible in the data. The study by Spinner (2013), then, is the only study that has looked

at the acquisition of various morphosyntactic structures within a PT framework. This

study differs from our own in many respects, including in learner characteristics (e.g. the
age of the participants), the learning context and the L1 background, but also in the type
of test instrument used. In the discussion section of this article, we will compare our
results to those of Spinner, consider how the methodological aspects of both studies may
have affected any differences in results, and draw conclusions for future research.
IV Receptive and productive grammar acquisition in

(second) language acquisition research
In research on developmental stages as well as in L1 and L2 acquisition research more
generally, relatively little effort has been made to integrate productive and receptive
grammar acquisition into a comprehensive theory of language acquisition. This is not to
say, however, that no attention whatsoever has been given to the relationship between
receptive and productive grammar acquisition.
One relevant subfield of SLA that has addressed the question of whether production
and comprehension share a common knowledge base and/or processing skills is research
on developmental asymmetries in L1 and L2 acquisition; that is, cases where compre-
hension appears to precede production in development or, more counter-intuitively,
where the opposite appears to be the case. For example, Unsworth (2007) found that
among child L2 learners of Dutch, ‘direct-object scrambling’ is more target-like in pro-
duction than in comprehension. Some researchers have attributed such findings to extra-
grammatical factors that come into play in the comprehension process but which do not
play a role in production. In particular a lack of pragmatic knowledge needed to interpret
certain constructions is often cited (Van Hout et al., 2010). Others dismiss the observed
asymmetries as experimental artefacts, e.g. as resulting from comprehension tasks that
are unnaturally difficult, or experimental tasks that do not adequately capture receptive
knowledge (Hendriks and Koster, 2010). Still others have sought explanations in the
organization and composition of the grammatical system. One explanation holds that
comprehension and production rely on different grammars, an explanation generally
considered non-parsimonious and, hence, unattractive because ‘such a linguistic model
would never account for the general adult pattern that we are able to understand whatever
we can produce and vice versa. Symmetry would then be the exception instead of the
rule’ (Hendriks and Koster, 2010: 1889). A more popular account for these asymmetries
is that production and comprehension share a common grammar knowledge base but
with potentially different, specialized processes. Opinions vary as to whether compre-
hension and production processes are entirely distinct (L White, 1991) or essentially the
same processes that operate in a different mapping direction (Keenan and MacWhinney,
1987; Smolensky, 1996).
Other research that bears on the relationship between receptive and productive gram-
mar acquisition is research on ‘receptive bilinguals’ (RBs), speakers who are capable of
comprehension in two languages but who can produce little or no speech in one of their
languages. Sherkina-Lieber et al. (2011) looked at morphological knowledge of Labrador
Inuttitut by Inuit receptive bilinguals to investigate whether this asymmetric knowledge
is caused by the fact that ‘speech production and speech comprehension rely on the same

Buyl and Housen 9
linguistic knowledge but are different processes’ (p. 303) or whether ‘their comprehen-
sion [is] based on vocabulary knowledge coupled with extensive use of context in famil-
iar situations, in the absence of actual grammar’ (p. 302). Results from a grammaticality
judgement task suggested that even receptive bilinguals with the lowest degree of recep-
tive skills ‘possess intuitions about the grammar of their receptively known language’ (p.
314). The authors speculate that receptive bilinguals’ grammar knowledge is insecure
and inconsistent, enabling them, for example, to know that a particular case morpheme
is needed in a certain morphosyntactic position, but not to select the correct case mor-
pheme in language production. Depending on the degree of syntactic knowledge at the
learner’s disposal, production problems may be more or less severe (resulting in hesita-
tions, errors, or a failure to produce certain constituents altogether).
A focus on receptive versus productive grammar skills and knowledge can also be
found in a strand of research that studies L2 learners’ receptive grammar knowledge
to determine whether certain persistent problems with L2 morphosyntax in produc-
tion constitute evidence of the absence of underlying grammar knowledge or of pro-
cessing difficulties in production. Some of these studies found that receptive
processing did not pose a problem for L2 learners, and hence attributed the problems
in production to productive processing skills. For example, problems with gender
have been attributed to ‘difficulties in identifying the appropriate morphological real-
ization of functional categories; that is, the problem lies in mapping from abstract
features to their surface morphological manifestation’ (Prévost and L White, 2000:
108). Conversely, however, a study by McCarthy (2008) found (qualitatively similar)
difficulties with grammatical gender in both productive and (offline) receptive tasks,
leading the author to argue that similar processing problems occur in receptive and
productive grammar processing.
In short, the diverse research available to date on the relationship between receptive
and productive grammar knowledge and processing skills yields mixed and inconclusive
findings. Overall, there appear to be both similarities and disparities between the recep-
tive and productive grammar systems, but clearly more research is needed to pinpoint the
shared and distinct properties of each type of grammar system and to integrate the diverse
findings into a comprehensive theory of SLA. The study of developmental stages in
receptive grammar acquisition within a PT framework is relevant in so far that it can help
shed light on the intricate relationship between production and reception in the L2 acqui-
sition process by showing whether similar processing procedures underlie the acquisi-
tion of receptive and productive grammar processing skills.
V Present study
The general research question addressed in the present study is to what extent the pro-
cessing procedures postulated by PT for productive L2 grammar acquisition also govern
the acquisition of learners’ receptive grammar processing skills. In order to answer this
question, we present a study on the order in which francophone children acquire English
morphosyntactic phenomena. The instrument for the study was developed within the
framework of the Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Project (ELIAS; Kersten
et al., 2010; Steinlen et al., 2010), a project on immersion education in Europe.2

1 Participants
Seventy-two francophone children between 6;11 and 8;8 years old (mean age: 7.8 years)
learning English as an L2 in an English primary school immersion program in the
French-speaking part of Belgium participated in the study. About a quarter of the chil-
dren were bilingual in French and an additional home language (e.g. Arabic, Italian or
Turkish). School contact with English amounted to approximately 10 hours per week.
The duration of L2 contact (i.e. time spent in the immersion programme) ranged from 18
to 41 months. None of the participants had any knowledge of English prior to entering
the immersion programme. They furthermore had little or no contact with English out-
side the school (Buyl and Housen, 2014).
2 Instrument and procedure

The learners’ receptive grammar knowledge was tested by means of the ELIAS Grammar
Test (henceforth EGT), a picture selection task based on the Reception of Syntax Test (P
Howell et al., 2003) and the Kiel Picture Pointing Test (Steinlen and Wetlaufer, 2005).
The EGT measures knowledge of nine grammatical phenomena by assessing learners’
ability to match an orally presented ‘prompt’ (containing a target grammatical phenom-
enon) with the picture representing the propositional content of this prompt. For each
prompt three drawings (‘response pictures’) were shown to the child (for examples, see
Appendix 1): one represents the prompt; a second, the ‘error’, differs from the prompt in
the grammatical dimension, i.e. it represents the same propositional content but the
grammatically contrasting value of the prompt (e.g. singular instead of plural); the third
picture, the distractor, depicts a different propositional content than the prompt. For
example, when presented with the prompt cats, learners must choose between drawings
of one cat (‘error’), of two cats (‘correct’), or of a dog (‘distractor’).
The EGT, like other picture selection tasks, relies on morphosyntactic contrasts. For
each targeted grammatical phenomenon (e.g. plural -s), the instrument contains not only
prompts representing this phenomenon but also an equal number of prompts representing
the contrasting grammatical value (e.g. singular nouns in the case of PLU, i.e. plural).
Each of the prompts representing one value is ‘paired’ with one of the contrastive
prompts, meaning that they differ in the value of the morphological contrast but not in
the lexico-semantic content (e.g. cats versus cat). Moreover, the same set of three
response pictures is used for the paired prompts. Thus, what serves as the ‘correct’ pic-
ture for one prompt serves as the ‘error’ for the paired prompt, and vice versa. Each
grammatical phenomenon is tested through six prompts, three of which represent one
value of the grammatical phenomena and three the contrasting value. Learners respond
by pointing to one of the three response pictures.
To avoid fatigue and diminishing concentration, the 54 test items of the EGT were
divided over two parts that were administered on separate occasions. The time lapse
between the administration of the two test parts varied due to the school’s schedule but
never exceeded seven days. The learners were tested individually in a quiet room in the
school during regular school times. Administration of each test part took approximately
10 minutes per child.

Buyl and Housen 11
Table 2. Grammatical phenomena in the ELIAS Grammar Test (EGT).
Target grammatical phenomenon Example of paired prompts

(+ its contrast)
AGRc agreement; copula verb be, present simple, The fish is black.
3rd person (singular vs. plural: is/are) The fish are black.
AGRv agreement; full verbs, present simple, 3rd The fish jumps.
person (singular vs. plural) The fish jump.
GEN genitive -s (absent vs. present) The girl is feeding the boy.
The girl is feeding the boy’s dog.
NEG negation, expressed by the sentence The duck is eating.
negator not (absent vs. present) The duck is not eating.
PLU plural marker -s (absent vs. present) cat
cats
SVO canonical word order The dog is chasing the cat.
The cat is chasing the dog.
Source. Adapted from Steinlen et al., 2010.
3 Grammatical phenomena and PT

Table 2 gives an overview of the six target grammatical phenomena that were investigated
in the present study, along with examples of paired prompts and the abbreviations used in
the remainder of this article. Table 3 shows at which PT stage we predict each target phe-
nomenon to become available. These predictions are based on the targeted grammatical
phenomena only, and not on any other grammatical phenomena that may be present in the
prompt. Thus, for the prompts targeting the phenomena GEN (e.g. The girl is feeding the
boy’s dog), NEG (e.g. The dog is not eating) and SVO (e.g. The boy is kissing the girl) we
assume that learners have to process the verbs forms only to the extent that they recognize
the verb lemma that expresses the action depicted in the response pictures. Grammatical
information such as progressive aspect or subject–verb agreement is not necessary for the
purpose of identifying the correct picture. This assumption is based on psycholinguistic
evidence that receptive parsing has access to a wide range of non-grammatical cues for
comprehension. Hence, given the availability of sufficient semantic or contextual cues,
listeners do not necessarily have to perform an in-depth analysis of all the grammatical
information encoded in the input in order to arrive at the meaning of the sentence (Garman,
1990; Van Gompel and Pickering, 2007). The EGT has been designed with this psycholin-
guistic information in mind. By presenting learners with pictures that contain the lexical
and semantic information given in the prompts, it is ensured that learners have enough
contextual information for a ‘superficial’ analysis of the prompt. An in-depth analysis is
required, however, to distinguish between the (propositionally related but grammatically
contrastive) error and correct picture (Steinlen et al., 2010).
We predict that GEN and PLU are Stage 2 phenomena because they require learn-
ers to access the lemma’s category information but do not involve any feature unifica-
tion (Pienemann, 2005b). SVO, the canonical word order in English, is also predicted
to emerge at this stage. For NEG, we predict that, within the context of the EGT,

Table 3. Classification of AGRc, AGRv, GEN, NEG, PLU and SVO into the Processability
Hierarchy for L2 English.
Stage Processing procedure Grammatical phenomenon

2 Category procedure PLU
SVO
GEN
NEG
5 S procedure AGRc
AGRv
receptive parsing of the prompts – which all took the form of ‘subject + is + not +
-ing-form’, as in The duck is not eating – becomes possible at Stage 2, i.e. the stage
at which PT predicts the most basic interlanguage negation form ‘Neg+SVO’ (e.g.
*No me live here) to become processable (Pienemann, 2011b). The prompts in the
ELIAS GT obviously do not take this interlanguage form. However, our classification
is again based on the assumption that, when presented with the three response pictures
for NEG (see Appendix 1), the only information that needs to be parsed in order to
select the correct picture in the EGT is the subject, the negator and the verb. Given the
contextual clues provided by the response pictures, all additional grammatical aspects
in the prompts (such as word order, or progressive tense) is irrelevant for the purpose
of selecting the correct picture.
Finally, subject–verb agreement in AGRc and AGRv requires the S-procedure (Stage
5) (Pienemann, 2005b). It should be noted here that PT is not entirely clear about the
status of copula verbs, i.e. whether this grammatical feature merely involves learning ‘is’
and ‘are’ as lexical items, or whether this also involves the S-procedure. However, since
copula verbs have in other studies been treated within the context of the S-procedure
(Dyson, 2009; Pienemann, 1998), we decided to also include copula be here at Stage 5.
In sum, the six ELIAS GT phenomena included in this study are predicted to emerge
at the two non-adjacent Stages 2 and 5 (Table 3). We believe that for the exploratory
purpose of this study it is sufficient to contrast two stages at the extremes of the develop-
mental continuum. If our receptive data confirm that Stage 2 phenomena are acquired
earlier than Stage 5 phenomena, further research can explore whether the application of
PT is still upheld for other grammatical phenomena and other stages in the developmen-
tal hierarchy.
4 Analytic procedures
a Emergence criterion. Crucially, PT makes predictions about the order in which certain
morphosyntactic phenomena emerge in L2 learners’ interlanguage, rather than the order
in which (accurate) native-like performance is reached. This distinction between emer-
gence and native-like acquisition is important because applying different definitions and
operational criteria of acquisition to the same data may yield different developmental
patterns (Hatch and Lazaraton, 1991; Pallotti, 2007; Pienemann, 1998).

Buyl and Housen 13
Applying the emergence criterion to a productive language data set involves a distri-
butional analysis in which it is (1) established whether the target grammatical phenom-
enon is used with a specific, selective function (as indicated, for example, by its absence
in inappropriate contexts), and (2) checked whether the feature is used productively, i.e.
whether it is rule-generated rather than accessed as a part of a memorized chunk or for-
mula (as, for example, indicated by the use of a morphosyntactic feature on different
lemmata; Pienemann, 1998; for an extensive discussion of the operationalization of the
emergence criterion, see also Pallotti, 2007). Importantly, this operationalization of
emergence is not applicable to datasets involving elicited production tasks such as fill-
the-gap exercises, nor to receptive language data.
Previous PT studies which used problematic types of elicited production have dealt
with the problem in ad hoc manners. For example, Baten (2011) used a fill-the-gap exer-
cise to elicit German case endings. Rather than setting acquisition criteria, Baten com-
pared the relative suppliance ratios of the different case endings in different contexts.
Glahn et al. (2001), in a language production study on adjective–noun agreement with
predicative and attributive adjectives in L2 Swedish, elicited the production of adjectives
by asking participants a number of questions concerning the properties of illustrated
items (e.g. ‘What colour are the small cups?’, to which participants were expected to
respond with a phrase like ‘They are brown.’). As an ad hoc solution to the problem that
‘it would of course be very difficult to find a criterion corresponding to “the first system-
atic use” ’ (Glahn et al., 2001: 398) for this type of task, emergence was defined as one
instance of correct agreement use out of 15 elicited responses. However, the emergence
criterion was further supplemented with a 50% and 80% acquisition criterion, so as to
see ‘to what extent the various criteria actually yield different pictures of the develop-
mental pattern’ (Glahn et al., 2001: 398).
In one of the two currently available PT studies on receptive grammar processing,
Keatinge and Keßler (2009) use a picture selection task. Problematically, Keatinge and
Keßler do not specify the cut-off point for emergence/acquisition used in their analysis.
The results showed that participants obtained only scores below 30% (which were inter-
preted as lack of acquisition) or above 70%. Their cut-off point for emergence/acquisition
could thus lie anywhere between 30% and 70%. In the second PT study, Spinner (2013)
used an acquisition criterion which was set at a score of 80% on the GJT (though she also
reports that other acquisition criteria were applied during the analyses which were not
reported because they corroborated the results of the 80% acquisition criterion).
In the EGT used in this study, six possible emergence/acquisition criteria (from 1 to 6
out of 6 correct) can be set (see Table 4). One might be tempted to interpret lower scores
as indicating ‘emergence’ and higher scores as indicating ‘full acquisition’. Doing so,
however, would ignore an important statistical factor, namely chance performance. In a
three-choice task, participants have one chance out of three to arrive at a correct reply
merely by guessing, and this for every of the six test items for a given grammatical phe-
nomenon. When setting a criterion, we must therefore establish whether the probability
that a participant meets this criterion is above chance performance, i.e. whether the prob-
ability of obtaining this score is below .05 (D C Howell, 2010). In the EGT we can be
certain that a participant was not guessing only when he or she obtained a score of 5 or 6
out of 6 (Table 5).

Table 4. Emergence/acquisition criteria (percentages in parentheses).
Scores ⩾ 1/6 (16.7) ⩾ 2/6 (33.3) ⩾ 3/6 (50.0) ⩾ 4/6 (66.7) ⩾ 5/6 (83.3) 6/6 (100)
0/6
1/6 
2/6  
3/6   
4/6    
5/6     
6/6      
Note. : the score is interpreted as ‘acquired’ according to the acquisition criterion.
Table 5. Emergence/acquisition criteria.
n 6
π 0.33
k 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
p⩾k 1.00 .91 .64 .31 .10 .02* .00*
Notes. n = number of prompts; π = chance level; k = number of correct responses; p ⩾ k = probability of

obtaining score k or higher by chance; * = score is above chance performance (p >.05).
We will present the implicational scales based on the statistically reliable ⩾ 5/6 and
6/6 criteria as well as the scales based on the other criteria. Although we cannot rule out
guessing behaviour in the case of the latter, a comparison of all six scales may still yield
relevant information at the exploratory stage represented by this research. In particular,
the overall rank order of the scales may reveal, if not universal developmental systema-
ticity, at least some developmental tendencies.
b Implicational scaling. In accordance with standard practice in PT research, the data are
analysed by means of implicational scaling, a technique which measures the consistency
across individual learners’ rank orders (Hatch and Lazaraton, 1991; Rickford, 2002). The
use of individual learners’ data (rather than group data) makes implicational scaling the
most appropriate currently available device for ‘revealing structure [i.e. developmental
systematicity] in variability, and for demonstrating that what some linguists might dis-
miss as random or free variation is significantly constrained’ (Rickford, 2002: 142).
An implicational scale consists of a matrix in which individual learners’ results for
different grammatical phenomena, recorded in the form of an ‘acquired’ (+) or ‘not
acquired’ (–) mark, are ordered following a scaling procedure. On one axis of the scale,
the phenomena are ordered from the one acquired by the largest number of learners to the
one acquired by the smallest number of learners, resulting in what will henceforth be
called the ‘overall rank order’. On the other axis, the individual learners are ordered from
the most advanced (i.e. having acquired the largest number of phenomena) to the least

Buyl and Housen 15
advanced. In order to support developmental systematicity, the individual learners’ rank

orders should be consistent with the overall rank order, i.e. when he or she has acquired
a given grammatical phenomenon, all phenomena that are ranked lower in the overall
rank order should also have been acquired.
Most implicational scaling studies allow for a limited number of deviations from the
‘perfect’ pattern. For example, a coefficient or index of reproducibility (IR) can be cal-
culated, which expresses the percentage of entries in the matrix that do not deviate from
this pattern. The matrix can be considered scalable when the IR is .93 or higher (Rickford,
2002). To give the reader an idea of the overall scalability of the implicational scales, we
will report the coefficient of reproducibility. However, it should be kept in mind that a
low IR cannot provide counterevidence to PT, because individual variation within the
rank order of the Stage 2 phenomena or within the rank order of the Stage 5 phenomena
is allowed (Pienemann and Keßler, 2011). Thus, a low IR is acceptable, as long as it does
not concern the between-stage level.
A final note on implicational scaling is that some PT studies pre-arrange the gram-
matical features under investigation in the order predicted by PT instead of arranging
them based on the number of participants that have acquired each feature. In this case
several grammatical features belonging to the same stage are furthermore combined into
one stage by marking a stage as acquired when at least one (or a few) of the features is
acquired, which is in line with the crucial claim (or disclaimer) that PT ‘does not predict
that whatever can be processed will indeed be acquired. Instead the theory predicts that
what cannot be processed will not be acquired’ (Pienemann, 2005b: 40), meaning that
not all features of a given stage need to have emerged in the learners’ interlanguage
before he or she can move on to the next stages. Coefficients of scalability are then cal-
culated for this ‘PT-scale’. Spinner (2013), for example, presents such ‘PT scales’ along-
side the conventional scales. In the current study, however, we opted against this
procedure, in favour of the conventional scalability procedure (at least for the purpose of
presenting the data), for the following reasons: First, showing the entire scale allows us
to illustrate how the different emergence/acquisition criteria affect the results, an inter-
esting aspect of implicational scaling at the current exploratory stage of research. Second,
given that there are only two PT-stages represented in the ELIAS GT, a brief look at the
conventional scale can quickly inform us about whether individual variation affects only
the inter-stage level, and/or also intra-stage level, thus giving us the same information as
the ‘PT-scales’.
VI Results
Tables 6 to 11 present the implicational scales using the criteria ⩾ 1/6, ⩾ 2/6 ⩾ 3/6, ⩾
4/6, ⩾ 5/6 and 6/6 respectively. In these scales, a ‘+’ in a column headed by one of the
grammatical phenomena indicates that the participant(s) in the corresponding row passed
the acquisition criterion for the grammatical phenomenon, while a ‘–’ signals that this was
not the case. For the sake of surveyability, the scales are contracted; that is, learners with
the same pattern of acquired and non-acquired items are combined into one row. On each
line, the number of participants who showed this pattern is indicated in the left-most col-
umn. For instance, in the ⩾ 1/6 scale (Table 6), 69 learners had a score equal to or higher
than 1/6 on all six target structures. The interpretation of results and the calculation of the

Table 6. Implicational scale: Acquisition criterion: ⩾ 1/6 correct.
n NEG GEN PLU AGRc SVO AGRv

69 + + + + + +
2 + + + + + –
1 + + + + – +
Note. Index of reproducibility (IR) = .99.
n NEG GEN PLU SVO AGRc AGRv

54 + + + + + +
5 + + + + + –
5 + + + + – +
1 + – + + + +
2 + + – + + +
2 + + + – + +
1 + + + + – –
1 + + + – + –
1 + + – – + –
n NEG GEN SVO PLU AGRv AGRc

25 + + + + + +
11 + + + + – +
14 + + + + + –
2 + + + – + +
2 + – + + + +
1 + + – + + +
2 + + + + – –
3 + + + – – +
3 + + + – + –
1 + + – + – +
1 + – – + + +
1 + + + + – –
1 + – + + – +
1 + + + – – –
1 + – – + – +
2 + + – – + –
1 – + – – – +

Buyl and Housen 17
n NEG GEN SVO PLU AGRv AGRc

2 + + + + + +
10 + + + + + –
8 + + + + – +
6 + + + + – –
7 + + + – + –
3 + + + – – +
1 + + – + – +
13 + + + – – –
2 + – – + + –
3 + + – + – –
3 + – + – – +
1 + – + + – –
4 + + – – – –
1 – + – + – –
1 + – – + – –
1 – – – + + –
4 + – – – – –
1 – – – + – –
1 – – – – – –
coefficients of scalability are based on the full scales, in line with what is considered the
appropriate method for interpreting scales.
We will first look in more detail at the scales for the acquisition criteria ⩾ 1/6, ⩾ 2/6,
⩾ 3/6 and ⩾ 4/6 - the four criteria which, though more likely to reflect ‘emergent’ rather
than consolidated knowledge, must be interpreted with caution due to the possibility of
chance performance.
In the ⩾ 1/6 scale, 69 participants passed the criterion for all six grammatical phe-
nomena, thereby giving us little information about the order in which they had done so.
Of the remaining three participants, two participants have a score of 1/6 or better for all
phenomena except AGRv (an order that is in line with PT), while one has acquired all
phenomena except SVO. Important for the present study is that the reversed order of
AGRc and SVO does not constitute counterevidence for PT, since the learner has
acquired NEG, GEN and PLU. Thus, despite the fact that the learner did not give any
correct replies on the SVO test items, the category procedure has clearly emerged. Note
that if the scale were to be rearranged according to what PT predicts and each stage was
considered acquired if a learner had acquired at least one of the structures of each stage,
all participants would have acquired both stages.
Next, the ⩾ 2/6, ⩾ 3/6 and ⩾ 4/6 scales all show an overall rank order that is in
accordance with PT: AGRc and AGRv are ranked last. The IR coefficients are below .93,
which means that the scales in their entirety are not scalable. Recall, however, that this

coefficient includes scalability violations that occur within Stage 2 and/or Stage 5, viola-
tions that are irrelevant for the applicability to PT. More important, then, are the indi-
vidual learners’ rank orders. In all three scales, a number of learners show a rank order
whereby AGRc and/or AGRv are acquired while one or more of the lower-ranked is not:
both in the ⩾ 3/6 scale and in the ⩾ 4/6 scale, 17 of the 72 learners show such a pattern
of pluses and minuses, as opposed to seven of the 72 learners in the ⩾ 2/6 scale and only
one learner in the ⩾ 1/6 scale. Again, however, in all these instances, the learners have
acquired at least two of the four Stage 2 phenomena, thereby confirming that the cate-
gory procedure has emerged. Conversely, and providing the clearest and most convinc-
ing support for PT, all three scales contain learners who have acquired some of the Stage
2 procedures but none of the Stage 5 procedures. This is the case for one participant in
the ⩾ 2/6 scale, four participants in the ⩾ 3/6 scale and 34 participants in the ⩾ 4/6 scale.
These situations clearly show that the S-procedure (Stage 5) emerges after the category
procedure (Stage 2).
It is clear that, at first sight, the total number of ‘acquired’ grammatical phenomena in
the above four scales decreases as the emergence/acquisition criterion is raised to a
higher score. In the ⩾ 1/6 scale (Table 6), 69 of the 72 learners have passed the acquisi-
tion criterion for all grammatical phenomena. This number drops to as few as 2 learners
in the ⩾ 4/6 scale. At the same time, the number of learners who have acquired only a
few of the grammatical phenomena increases as the acquisition criterion is raised. This
result is noteworthy because it indicates that the statistical effect of chance performance
is not so strong so as to distort the general picture emerging from these scales, and the
scales may thus be considered informative in terms of their general outcome, i.e. the sup-
port for PT offered by the overall rank order.
Finally, these four scales also clearly illustrate how the choice of an acquisition crite-
rion can affect the outcome of an implicational scale, a point already raised by Hatch and
Lazaraton (1991). Some stage-internal variation can be found, first, in the order of PLU
versus SVO (the ⩾ 3/6 and ⩾ 4/6 scales show an SVO–PLU order, the ⩾ 2/6 scale a
PLU–SVO order) and, second, in the order of AGRc and AGRv (AGRc–AGRv order in
the ⩾ 3/6 and ⩾ 4/6 scales, AGRv–AGRc order in the ⩾ 2/6 scale). It warrants repeat-
ing, however, that the correspondence with the PT hierarchy is not affected.
In contrast to the ⩾ 1/6, ⩾ 2/6, ⩾ 3/6 and ⩾ 4/6 scales, the results from the ⩾ 5/6
scale (Table 10) and 6/6 scale (Table 11) can be confidently discussed not only in terms
of the overall rank order of the grammatical phenomena but also in terms of the indi-
vidual variation that is found in the scale, since the results in this scale are statistically
reliable in terms of chance performance.
The order from first to last acquired for both the ⩾ 5/6 and 6/6 criteria is: NEG–SVO–
GEN–PLU–AGRc–AGRv. The rank orders in both scales are thus again in line with the
ones predicted by PT, with AGRc and AGRv ranked last. The IR coefficients furthermore
confirm that the 6/6 scale is scalable (with the ⩾ 5/6 yielding a borderline coefficient of
.92), and that the rank order in these scales applies also at the intra-stage level (i.e. NEG
is, according to this scale, acquired before SVO, followed by GEN, and so forth).3
If we look at the ⩾ 5/6 scale in more detail, it can be observed that two learners in this
scale have acquired all Stage 2 phenomena as well as AGRc. Nine learners in this scale
have acquired neither AGRc nor AGRv but have acquired all of the Stage 2 phenomena

Buyl and Housen 19
N NEG SVO GEN PLU AGRc AGRv

2 + + + + + –
9 + + + + – –
16 + + + – – –
3 + + – + – –
1 + + – – + –
1 + + – – – +
1 – + + + – –
14 + + – – – –
2 + – + – – –
1 + – – + – –
1 + – – – – +
2 – + + – – –
1 – + – + – –
1 – + – – + –
10 + – – – – –
1 – + – – – –
2 – – + – – –
4 – – – – – –
Table 11. Implicational scale: Acquisition criterion: 6/6 correct.
n NEG SVO GEN PLU AGRc AGRv

12 + + + – – –
2 + + – + – –
1 – + + + – –
13 + + – – – –
2 – + – + – –
1 – – + + – –
17 + – – – – –
1 – – + – – –
23 – – – – – –
(NEG, SVO, GEN, PLU). Fifty-seven learners have not yet acquired AGRc and AGRv,
nor have they acquired all of the Stage 2 phenomena, e.g. 16 learners have acquired only
NEG, SVO and GEN; three learners have acquired only NEG, SVO and PLU; and so
forth. All three situations provide strong support for PT.
Further observations concerning the ⩾ 5/6 scale are that one learner has passed the
5/6 threshold for AGRc without yet having done so for GEN and PLU; one learner has
acquired AGRv while not yet having acquired GEN and PLU; one learner has acquired

AGRv while not yet having acquired SVO, GEN and PLU; and, finally, one learner has
acquired AGRc while not yet having acquired NEG, GEN and PLU. For reasons
explained above, these cases nevertheless also support PT.
Finally, in the 6/6 scale, no deviations from the predicted PT rank order are observed.
Forty-nine participants had acquired at least one of the Stage 2 phenomena, but none of the
Stage 5 phenomena. Twenty-three of the learners had acquired none of the phenomena.
VII General discussion

The present study set out to investigate to what extent the PT procedures that have been
established for productive L2 grammar acquisition also govern the acquisition of learn-
ers’ receptive grammar knowledge. To address this question, we investigated whether L2
learners of English systematically acquire the English grammatical phenomena negation,
genitive -’s, canonical word order and plural -s, none of which require any exchange of
grammatical information (and hence are predicted to be processable from Stage 2 of the
Processability Hierarchy onwards), before cases of agreement between the subject and
verb (copula verb be or a main verb), which are hypothesized to involve the exchange of
grammatical information between phrases and hence are predicted to emerge later in the
L2 grammar acquisition process (at Stage 5 of the Processability Hierarchy).
Cross-sectional data from a picture selection task (the ELIAS Grammar Test) admin-
istered to 72 francophone child learners of L2 English suggests that the targeted gram-
matical phenomena are acquired in an order that is compatible with PT. Applying
different criteria of what counts as ‘acquired’ to the data and analysing the data using
implicational scaling yielded acquisition orders in which the Stage 2 features are
acquired before the Stage 5 features. Looking at the scales at the level of the individual
learners confirms the applicability of PT. Regardless of the acquisition criterion used,
all learners who have acquired one or both Stage 5 phenomena had also acquired at least
some of the Stage 2 phenomena. Missing knowledge of some of the Stage 2 phenomena
can be accounted for by PT’s assumption that the acquisition of a particular processing
procedure will not necessarily lead to the immediate and simultaneous emergence of all
grammatical phenomena, which are governed by this processing procedure (Pienemann,
1998, 2005a).
Studying developmental stages in receptive grammar acquisition was argued to be
relevant for two reasons. First, it gives us a more complete picture of staged development
and its driving forces by looking at both modes of grammar acquisition. The results of
the present study, then, would suggest, albeit tentatively, that receptive and productive
grammar acquisition involve the same developmental stages and are governed by the
same processing-related factors, i.e. those outlined by PT. Second, the proposed research
was argued to be relevant for SLA and psycholinguistics research more generally because
it increases our understanding of the relationship between receptive and productive L2
grammar processing, and thus contributes to the ultimate goal of SLA research to con-
struct a comprehensive theory of SLA, which includes principled accounts of both recep-
tive and productive grammar processing skills and the underlying mental grammar
system. The finding from the present study that PT’s processing procedures may govern
the development of receptive grammar processing skills entails that receptive and

Buyl and Housen 21
productive language processing share important mechanisms, and that these mechanisms
govern the receptive and productive L2 acquisition process in similar ways.
The results from the present study sharply contrast with those found by Spinner
(2013). The data from the GJT used by Spinner showed no inter-learner systematicity.
Apart from the different test instruments and the differences in learner characteristics
(e.g. adults versus children), the following differences between the two studies are worth
pointing out. First, the present study looked only at Stage 2 and Stage 5 structures, while
Spinner’s GJT included three structures each for the Stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 and two struc-
tures for Stage 6. We cannot exclude the possibility that the present study gives a prema-
ture impression of systematicity because there are no Stage 3 and Stage 4 structures.
Focusing on Stage 2 and 5 in Spinner’s studies indeed shows only few instances where
Stage 5 was acquired while Stage 2 was not. Another noteworthy difference is that
Spinner, when collapsing the three structures of a stage together in order to avoid inter-
stage variation to affect the scalability coefficient, marked a stage as acquired only when
at least 2 of the 3 structures of that stage were acquired. When a participant had acquired
only 1 of the 3 structures of a given stage, the stages was not marked as acquired. It is
possible that results would have been different if stages had also been considered acquired
in the latter case.
Finally, it should be acknowledged that the present study, which sought to study
receptive grammar acquisition by means of a comprehension-based task, is not free of
methodological limitations, some of which may also explain the discrepancy between
the present study and Spinner’s findings derived from a GJT. The following section will
outline the methodological limitations and discuss ways in which they may be overcome
in future research.
VIII Methodological limitations and future research

Two methodological limitations that were already pointed out are the absence of any
structures belonging to Stages 3 and 4, and the problem of chance performance in set-
ting an emergence criterion. Future research will have to see whether the applicability
of PT to receptive grammar development is confirmed when additional, intermediate
stages are included. Another challenge for further research is to formulate definitions of
emergence versus acquisition in the context of receptive grammar acquisition, and
devise valid and reliable ways for operationalizing these definitions in a widely appli-
cable manner.
Other methodological limitations should be pointed out. First, doubts could be raised
concerning the extent to which the AGRc and AGRv prompts in the ELIAS GT target the
intended grammatical knowledge, i.e. subject–verb agreement. As is commonly done in
picture-selection tasks, the prompts in these categories all contain nouns with a zero
plural (e.g. sheep, fish, deer) as the subject (Blom and Unsworth, 2010; P Howell et al.,
2003; Johnson et al., 2005); this is to avoid that learners can interpret the sentence on the
basis of the plural -s on the nouns alone (i.e. without processing the verbal morphemes).
The result of the stimulus design, however, is that, although learners now must process
the 3SG-s (AGrv) and the copula verb (AGRc), it cannot be said with absolute certitude
that subject–verb agreement takes place, since zero plural nouns do not contain overt

number information. Although this type of design is commonly used for assessing young
learners’ knowledge (or processing skills) of subject–verb agreement, it may be expedi-
ent for future research to explore alternative methods for testing subject–verb agreement
processing.
The former limitation is related to the more general issue that comprehension involves
not just grammatical parsing but also lexical and semantic inferential processes. The
ELIAS GT, like other comprehension tasks and particularly picture selection tasks, has
been carefully designed to ensure that learners have to process the targeted grammatical
structure. Even so, it remains true that one can never be entirely certain of what goes on
in the learners’ mind when processing input. One reviewer wondered whether GEN
really requires learners to process the genitive -’s and whether there might not be suffi-
cient clues in the pictures to correctly respond without actual processing of the genitive
-’s. This issue indeed illustrates that, although picture selection tasks (many of which
contain similar prompts for testing genitive -’s and subject–verb agreement) are widely
used and considered a valid and reliable procedure (especially in research on child acqui-
sition, where methodological options are more limited than with adult learners; see, for
example, Blom and Unsworth, 2010; Gerken and Shady, 1996), it should not be taken for
granted that tasks test what we think or want them to test.
To address the limitations of the present study, then, it may be fruitful for future
research to look beyond the tasks used in both this study and in the previous studies by
Spinner (2013) and Keatinge and Keßler (2009). In particular, tasks that tap into online
processing, such as self-paced reading or listening or eye-tracking may have some poten-
tial for investigating receptive grammar development, including within a PT framework.
First, although research will still have to think about how emergence versus acquisition
is operationalized, these tasks have the advantage that they do not involve multiple-
choice replies. Thus, guessing behaviour or chance performance does not come into play.
Second, online processing tasks such as self-paced reading/listening and eye-tracking are
seen as adequate instruments for gaining insight into learners’ ability to implicitly pro-
cess grammatical agreement, such as subject–verb agreement or agreement between
adjective and nouns (Marinis, 2003; Roberts, 2012) m more so, perhaps, than grammati-
cality judgement tasks or picture selection tasks. Given that PT deals with productive
online processing skills and with learners’ ability to unify and exchange grammatical
information, and given the aim of the present research venture to apply PT to the recep-
tive counterpart of this language skill, tasks which target receptive online processing
seem particularly appropriate for future research.
Finally, two more considerations for future research are in order. A first concerns the
cross-sectional nature of the data in the present study. Although it has been claimed that
the use of different acquisition criteria with cross-sectional data ‘will to some extent
reveal the dimension of gradual acquisition’ (Glahn et al., 2001: 398), longitudinal data
ultimately provide the best basis for identifying developmental patterns in language
acquisition (Ellis, 2008). Second, the present study did not look at production data
because the explicit nature of the predictions made by PT in principle allows testing the
applicability of the theory to receptive grammar acquisition, without a comparison with
production data. Nevertheless, a comparison with production data from the same learners
is worthwhile. Although PT has received empirical support from a considerable body of

Buyl and Housen 23
research based on production data, others scholars have disputed the theory by adducing
production-based counterevidence (Charters et al., 2011; Dyson, 2009). Second, looking
at the emergence of grammatical structures in comprehension relative to their emergence
in production is useful for obtaining an even better understanding of the developmental
relationship between receptive and productive processing skills. A first attempt in this
direction was undertaken by Keatinge and Keßler (2009). However, as mentioned earlier,
this study looked at one structure only (the passive voice). Clearly, research on a wider
range of features is necessary.
Acknowledgements
All data in this article were collected by the present authors within the framework of the Early
Language and Intercultural Acquisition Studies (ELIAS) project (Kersten et al., 2010), of which
the present authors were team members. The data were reanalysed for the purpose of this article,
and results are reported with permission of the fellow ELIAS team members - for which we thank
them. We would also like to thank Gabriele Pallotti for his feedback on an earlier version of this
article, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Any errors that remain
are of course ours.
Declaration of conflicting interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This work was made possible by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), where the first author
is a PhD Fellow.
Notes
1. Interestingly, Pienemann and Lenzing (2015: 159) state that ‘at any stage in the development
the learner can produce and comprehend only those L2 linguistic forms which the current
state of the language processor can handle’ (159; our emphasis). However, this quote seems
to be a lone case. In other publications, the scope of PT is defined as pertaining to productive
grammar knowledge only.
2. All data were collected for the ELIAS project by the present authors, who were mem-
bers of the ELIAS team, and were reanalysed with the permission of the ELIAS project
coordinators.
3. Again, some differences in the rank orders of ⩾ 5/6 and 6/6 scale compared to the previous
scales can be observed, but these are not relevant for the PT aspect of the present study.
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Buyl and Housen 27
Appendix 1
ELIAS Grammar TesT: EXAMPLE Prompts AND response pictures
Figure 1. AGRc.
Figure 2. AGRv.
Figure 3. GEN.

Figure 4. NEG.
Figure 5. PLU.
Figure 6. SVO.

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Developmental stages in receptive grammar acquisition: A Processability

Article in Second language Research · May 2015

Aafke Buyl Alex Housen

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

L2 complexity - definition, operationalisation, development View project

ELIAS (Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Studies) View project

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Second Language Research

Aafke Buyl and Alex Housen

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II Theoretical framework: Processability Theory

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1. The lemma procedure activates the lexical items.

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Table 1. Developmental stages in English.

Stage Processing procedure Examples

Source. Adapted from Pienemann, 2005a, 2011a: 51, 63.

As a theory of L2 grammar acquisition, PT is noteworthy for making explicit and

2 Developmental stages in L2 English

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4. structures such as subject–verb agreement, which involves between-phrasal uni-

3 ‘Feature unification’, ‘processing procedures’ and receptive grammar

III Previous research on developmental stages in

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(1975) examined adult L2 learners’ productive and receptive knowledge of 10 English

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at the acquisition of various morphosyntactic structures within a PT framework. This

IV Receptive and productive grammar acquisition in

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2 Instrument and procedure

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Table 2. Grammatical phenomena in the ELIAS Grammar Test (EGT).

Target grammatical phenomenon Example of paired prompts

Source. Adapted from Steinlen et al., 2010.

3 Grammatical phenomena and PT

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Stage Processing procedure Grammatical phenomenon

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Table 4. Emergence/acquisition criteria (percentages in parentheses).

Note. : the score is interpreted as ‘acquired’ according to the acquisition criterion.

Table 5. Emergence/acquisition criteria.

Notes. n = number of prompts; π = chance level; k = number of correct responses; p ⩾ k = probability of

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advanced. In order to support developmental systematicity, the individual learners’ rank

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Table 6. Implicational scale: Acquisition criterion: ⩾ 1/6 correct.

n NEG GEN PLU AGRc SVO AGRv

Note. Index of reproducibility (IR) = .99.

Table 7. Implicational scale: Acquisition criterion: ⩾ 2/6 correct.

n NEG GEN PLU SVO AGRc AGRv

Note. Index of reproducibility (IR) = .84.

Table 8. Implicational scale: Acquisition criterion: ⩾ 3/6 correct.

n NEG GEN SVO PLU AGRv AGRc

Note. Index of reproducibility (IR) = .86.