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Developmental Stages in Receptive Grammar Acquisition: A Processability Theory Account
Developmental Stages in Receptive Grammar Acquisition: A Processability Theory Account
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DOI: 10.1177/0267658315585905
acquisition: A Processability slr.sagepub.com
Theory account
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
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
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.
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:
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.
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);
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).
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).
Table 3. Classification of AGRc, AGRv, GEN, NEG, PLU and SVO into the Processability
Hierarchy for L2 English.
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).
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).
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
n 6
π 0.33
k 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
p⩾k 1.00 .91 .64 .31 .10 .02* .00*
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
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
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
(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.
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.
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
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.
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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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.