Robert M. DeKeyser University of Pittsburgh If the ability to use language in the restricted sense (i.e., a communication system characterized by double articulation) is quintessentially human, then explaining this ability is a crucial task for cognitive science, and explaining its acquisition is a crucial task for developmental psychology. If the difficulty of acquiring a second language (L2), at least at a later age, stands in sharp contrast to the childs celebrated accomplishments, then explaining this contrast is equally important for developing a complete understanding of humans abilities to use and acquire language. In fact, it can be argued that it is the enormous contrast between the two phenomena that needs explaining, rather than either of the two phenomena per se. One way to tackle this problem is the social science approach of correlating age and many other demographic variables with success in acquisition: to disentangle design features of the species from accidental characteristics of the environment. Another approach consists of investigating what elements or characteristics of an L2 are hard to acquire: to understand better how weaknesses in the acquisition process interact with the design features of human languages. And of course, one can look at the two variables in interaction with each other: Which problematic elements of the Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert DeKeyser, Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260, USA. Internet: RDK1@pitt.edu 1 language are an issue in L2 learning at any age, and which are mostly a problem for later acquirers only? Or even better, how do five different variables interact in L2 acquisition: the characteristics of the L2, the influence of the first language (L1), the role of age, the role of individual differences in cognitive and affective aptitudes, and the role of learning context, be it the native-speaking environment or the classroom, the latter representing, of course, a wide variety of learning contexts with different degrees of emphasis on form and meaning? The focus of this introductory review article is on the char- acteristics of the L2 itself (and its differences from L1) that make its acquisition difficult. Given the very broad nature of the topic, I will touch on the issues of age, other individual differences, and learning context only to the extent that they cannot be ignored because nothing can be generalized without taking them into account. I also restrict discussion to morphosyntax rather than phonology or the lexicon and to the acquisition of competence rather than processing, recognizing here too that all such separations are to some extent superficial because the meaning of morphemes and the distribution of their allomorphs cannot be acquired without the phonological capacity to extricate them from the flood of sounds in every sentence, and because competence is only a (some would say fictional) abstraction of what humans do when they understand or produce language, and acquiring this competence necessarily happens through processing input (cf., esp., Pienemann, 2003; Truscott & Sharwood Smith, 2004). Finally, I emphasize publications from the past 5 years in keeping with the criteria for selecting articles for the Best of Language Learning series. Broad Definitions of Difficulty Even a cursory glance at some well-known discussions of what is difficult in L2 acquisition shows how tricky this concept is. Krashen (1982) and R. Ellis (1990), for instance, at first sight appear to agree that one needs to make a distinction between 2 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? formal and functional complexity. But the same structure, third person s in English as a Second Language (ESL), was classified by Krashen (1982) as easy to learn because it is simple, and by Ellis (1990) as hard to learn because it is complex. One might think that the reason for this discrepancy is that Krashen was dealing with learning in the narrow sense here (as opposed to implicit acquisition) and Ellis with a broader meaning of learning, but when one looks at their reasons for classifying this structure as easy or difficult, it is clear that they used different criteria for deciding on the complexity of s: Krashen pointed to the simple dichotomous choice between supplying this simple morpheme or not, whereas Ellis, referring to Pienemann (1984), pointed to the long-distance relationship between the grammatical number of the subject and the presence or absence of s on the verb. Nor is the disagreement due to a mere focus on formal complexity by Krashen versus a broader look at the form-function relationship by Ellis: The latter actually goes beyond Krashen by considering even the form-function relationship for s to be simple (transparent); it is only because of the processing operations required that Ellis considered the structure to be complex (1990, p. 167). It appears, then, that at least three factors are involved in determining grammatical difficulty: complexity of form, complexity of meaning, and complexity of the form-meaning relationship. Even this picture, however, is not complete; it actually leaves out the core psycholinguistic difficulty of acquisition, that is, the difficulty of grasping the form-meaning relationship while processing a sentence in the L2. Rather than forms, meanings, or form-meaning relationships, it is the trans- parency of form-meaning relationships to a learner who is processing language for meaning that determines the difficulty of acquisition, at least for learners who are left to their own resources instead of presented with a reasonably complete set of rules about form-meaning relationships. Part of what determines this transparency is the degree of importance of a linguistic form for the meaning it expresses: Certain morphemes are the one and only clue to the meaning DeKeyser 3 they express; others are largely or completely redundant, because they mark grammatical agreement with meanings whose primary representations are elsewhere in the sentence or the discourse. VanPatten (e.g., 1990) has therefore emphasized the distinction between meaningful and redundant for predicting what will be easy or hard to acquire, especially inearly stages of L2 development. Some researchersmost notably Stockwell, Bowen, and Martin (1965)have drawn up elaborate hierarchies of difficulty of acquisition based on form-meaning mapping. But the work of Stockwell, Bowen, and Martin (1965) focused primarily on Spanish, put more emphasis on L1L2 surface differences than is warranted by more recent research on the role of L1, and was largely nonempirical. They also left out completely the notion of salience in the input, presumably because they were thinking of instructed learning contexts, in which salience is less of an issue than in naturalistic L2 acquisition, a phenomenon that was not yet a topic of research at that time. Other researchers, recognizing the difficulty of defining difficulty, have avoided a theoretical conceptualization altogether. When structures needed to be classified according to difficulty, they chose to ask teachers to rate L2 structures for the level of difficulty they seemed to present intuitively (e.g., Robinson, 1996). While such an approach may be a useful operationalization, depending on the nature of the study, it still leaves us with the question of what constitutes difficulty. In what follows, I present various components of grammatical difficulty, with at least a modest amount of empirical evidence for their importance in acquisition or lack thereof and for how they fit into the broader picture of interaction with each other and with individual and contextual factors (the latter including L1 as well as instruction). One way of isolating components of difficulty is to look separately at problems of meaning, problems of form, and problems of form-meaning mapping. 4 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? Problems of Meaning Regardless of the formused to express a meaning, the meaning itself can constitute a source of difficulty, because of novelty, abstractness, or a combination of both. Articles, classifiers, grammatical gender, and verbal aspect are notoriously hard to acquire for native speakers of L1s that do not have them or that use a very different system (for articles in ESL, see, e.g., Jarvis, 2002; Liu & Gleason, 2002; Robertson, 2000; Tarone & Parrish, 1988; Thomas, 1989; Young, 1996; cf. also Celce-Murcia & Larsen- Freeman, 1999, chap. 15; for classifiers in Japanese and Chinese, see, e.g., Hansen & Chen, 2001; for grammatical gender in a variety of languages, see, e.g., Carroll, this volume; Kempe & Brooks, this volume; Taraban, 2004; Williams & Lovatt, this volume; for aspect in Romance or Germanic languages, see, e.g., Andersen & Shirai, 1994, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 1998, 1999, 2000; Collins, 2002; Dietrich, Klein, & Noyau, 1995; Lee, 2001; Montrul & Slabakova, 2003; Salaberry, 2000). These elements of grammar are even strongly resistant to instructional treatments (for aspect see, e.g., Ayoun, 2004; Ishida, 2004; for gender see, e.g., Leeman, 2003; for articles see, e.g., Butler, 2002; Master, 1997). What they all have in common is that they express highly abstract notions that are extremely hard to infer, implicitly or explicitly, from the input. Where the semantic system of the L1 is different from that of the L2, as is very often the case for aspect, or where equivalent notions do not get expressed overtly in L1, except through discourse patterns, as may be the case for ESL articles for native speakers of most Slavic languages or Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, the learning problem is serious and long-lasting. Problems of Form Difficulty of language form is largely an issue of complexity. Assuming the learner knows exactly the meanings that need to be expressed, difficulty of form could be described as the number of DeKeyser 5 choices involved in picking all the right morphemes and allomorphs to express these meanings and putting them in the right place. Clearly, this problem is most complex in richly inflected languages, whether they be agglutinative, polysynthetic, or inflectional in the narrow sense. Everything else (such as semantic difficulty) being the same, the more that needs to be expressed overtly, the more choices need to be made about morphemes, allomorphs, and their position. Morphology in L2 is hard: Basic word order is typically nonproblematic past the initial stages of acquisition, but even the most basic morphology is often lacking from the speech of untutored immigrants (see, e.g., Klein & Dittmar, 1979) and of classroom learners who are not able to monitor themselves effectively (see, e.g., Krashen & Pon, 1975; Tarone, 1985). Morphology is even shakily represented in learners intuitions, even after many years of exposure to the L2 (e.g., DeKeyser, 2000; Johnson & Newport, 1989). Much ink has been spent discussing whether continuing failure to supply these morphemes systematically is truly a problem of competence or one of mere performance. Given the poor scores of adult immigrants on grammaticality judgment tests on this point (in ESL, e.g., third person s, articles, or plurals in DeKeyser, 2000; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Yeni-Komshian, Robbins, & Flege, 2001) and the failure of intermediate English- speaking foreign language students even to take into account the meaning of elementary morphology in order to come to the correct understanding of a sentence (see, esp., VanPatten, 2004; cf. also MacWhinney, 2001, in press), it seems safe to conclude that more than processing is at stake. Jiang (2004), in particular, showed convincingly that errors of verb agreement with complex noun phrases in ESL were due to lack of sensitivity to plural marking on the noun, not to problems with processing agreement. This problem of L2 users failing to use morphology, even in comprehension, is so fundamental that it has by itself spawned entire bodies of literature. The research on processing instruction has showed that students benefit from intensive training in paying attention to elements of morphology for comprehension, because 6 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? without such practice they tend to gloss over the morphology (especially students of a morphology-poor language like English acquiring a relatively morphology-rich language like Spanish). The interpretation of various aspects of the processing-instruction literature has been controversial (see, e.g., DeKeyser, Salaberry, Robinson, & Harrington, 2002; VanPatten & Wong, 2002). But nobody doubts that L2 students need to have their attention drawn to morphology while processing input, because otherwise they tend to ignore the morphological cues to sentence meaning. The research within the framework of the competition model, on the other hand, has shown repeatedly, with speakers of a variety of L1s and L2s, that morphology is a weak cue in initial stages of language learning, at least for English L1 speakers, and that if it becomes stronger over time, this only happens in a very slow and gradual fashion (cf., esp., MacWhinney, 2001, in press; see, e.g., Hertel, 2003; Kempe & MacWhinney, 1998; McDonald, 1987). More formal approaches to morphosyntax, however different they may be in other respects, coincide in singling out morphology as hard to acquire in comparison with syntax. Lardiere (1998), Prevost and White (2000), and Sprouse (1998) provide evidence that morphological and syntactic features that are closely linked in syntactic theory (verb raising and inflection) are not acquired together. One way out of this problem, from the point of view of a theory in which such a link is seen as crucial, is the view that learners acquire the syntactic features easily but continue to have problems with their morphological instantiation (cf. Sorace, 2003, and Lardieres summary of several of her own articles in Long, 2003). Problems of Form-Meaning Mapping Even assuming that neither formnor meaning is particularly problematic according to the criteria mentioned in the previous two sections, acquiring the form-meaning mapping can still be difficult if the link between form and meaning is not transparent. DeKeyser 7 Such lack of transparency can be due to at least three factors: redundancy, optionality, or opacity. Redundancy means that the form at issue is not semanti- cally necessary because its meaning is also expressed by at least one other element of the sentence; for example, a verb ending can be redundant because the subject is explicit, whether it be a full noun phrase or a pronoun, which makes person and number information redundant, and because adverbs or other lexical items make information such as tense or aspect redundant (cf., e.g., VanPatten, 1990). When the redundant element is also abstract and novel, then the learning problem is particularly severe: Robinson (2002), for instance, showed that learners of Samoan L2 had more trouble with the ergative marker than with the locative or noun incorporation, because the ergative marker (both novel for learners of L1 English and abstract) was semantically redundant, which the other two structures were not. Optionality of certain elements, such as null subjects in Spanish or Italian (see, e.g., Herschensohn, 2000; Liceras, 1989) or case marking in Korean, only makes matters worse. Not only does the optional character of the case marking or the overt subject pronoun suggest it is redundant, but its alternating presence or absence in the presence of the same meaning, except for subtle aspects of pragmatics, makes the form- meaning link even harder to establish. (This optionality in the L2 as a cause of acquisition problems is not to be confused with optionality in the sense of interlanguage variability, which is a consequence of a variety of problems with the acquisition of features that are not variable in the L2; cf. Papp, 2000; Prevost & White, 2000; Robertson, 2000; Sorace, 2000, 2003.) Opacity is a complex form of the problem of low form-meaning correlation. When a morpheme has different allomorphs, and at the same time it is homophonous with other grammatical morphemes, then the correlation between form and meaning becomes very hard to detect: Different forms stand for the same meaning, and the same form stands for different meanings. This, of course, is exactly the case for s in English, which can be the 8 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? third-person singular of the verb, the plural of the noun, or the genitive of the noun and in each case has the same three allomorphs. Where third-person singular is concerned, this problem of low correlation between form and meaning is further compounded by the so-called morphemes really being a morph (a chunk of sound isolated in morphological analysis, but without a one-to-one mapping with any meaning), in this case conflating three different meanings (singular, third person, present tense), all of which are expressed by separate morphemes in many languages, and all of which have to be present at the same time for s to appear, and all of which are rather abstract and therefore difficult by themselves. More generally, instances of morphological irregularity, such as irregular plurals and irregular past tenses, all fall into this category: The problem is not so much a problem of form (an irregular is not necessarily more formally complex); it is the form-meaning mapping that becomes more opaque and/or complex. Other examples of opaque form-meaning mappings can be found in syntax, such as the relationship between the order of subject and verb in Spanish, on the one hand, and the lexical semantics of the verb and the discourse functions of subject-verb inversion, on the other hand. Hertel (2003) showed how learners of L2 Spanish do not use much verb-subject (VS) order till they are quite advanced in their L2 proficiency and that even the advanced learners do not make any distinction between unergatives and unaccusatives when it comes to VS order, even though native speakers clearly do. The optional nature of the VS order makes it even harder to acquire its correlation with the abstract semantic elements that favor its appearance. DeKeyser (2005) also documents a virtual total absence of VS order for any kind of verb in declarative sentences among intermediate Spanish learners during a 6-week stay in Argentina. Jungs (2004) finding that English speakers did not acquire topic prominence in Korean L2 till the advanced level, in spite of the hypothetical universal nature of topic prominence in early inter- language, can be seen as another example of how difficult it is to DeKeyser 9 map a variable phenomenon to abstract discourse-dependent semantics. To the learner, many cases of opacity probably appear to be instances of optionality. The acquisition problem is compounded even further when optionality and discourse-motivated preferences for one of the options interact with arbitrary or semantically obscure subcat- egorization restrictions, such as, in Japanese L2, the restriction of goal PPs to directed-motion verbs (Inagaki, 2001) or the restriction of quantifier floating to unaccusatives (Sorace & Shomura, 2001), and in English L2, the restriction of agentive use to manner-of- motion verbs as opposed to change-of-state verbs (Montrul, 2001), the restrictions on dative alternation (see esp. Inagaki, 1997; Whong-Barr & Schwartz, 2002), and those on locative alternation (see esp. Bley-Vroman & Joo, 2001; Joo, 2003; Juffs, 1996). The possibility of alternation seems to be motivated by semantic criteria, but according to Pinker (1989), at least 14 semantically defined verb classes need to be distinguished for locative alternation and 10 for dative alternation. When, on top of that, relevant input is very limited in ESL materials (Juffs, 1998) and probably even in more natural input, it is clear that acquisition is a challenge, to say the least. Even simpler subcategorization restrictions, such as which English verbs take an infinitive and which a gerund, appear to be problematic, even after decades of exposure to the language (DeKeyser, 2000; Flege, Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1999; Johnson & Newport, 1989; McDonald, 2000). Finally, an important factor that helps determine ease or difficulty of learning form-meaning mappings is, of course, frequency. N. Ellis (2002, 2003) provided evidence from a variety of sources on the role of frequency in L2 learning. He argued that the typical route of acquisition of grammar structures is from formulae through low-scope patterns to constructions and that the abstraction of regularities within these constructions is frequency-based. In principle, the importance of frequency is independent of semantic transparency, but how important frequency is depends to some extent on the transparency of the mapping. If the mapping is very clear, minimal exposure may be 10 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? enough for acquisition; if it is very obscure, the structure may well never be acquired by adults. If the transparency of the mapping is in between these two extremes, frequency may largely determine whether the mapping is acquired or not, in further interaction, of course, with the learners aptitude and (methods of) instruction. Hansen and Chen (2001), for instance, provided a clear example of a set of morphemes in which frequency played a very important role: classifiers in Chinese and Japanese L2. As the structure is fairly salient and its function is clear, but the choice of the right formis based on semantic criteria that are hard to define, the level of difficulty is such that the role of frequency is maximized. Where to Look for Direct Evidence on What Is Difficult? I have presented a number of factors that make the acquisition of L2 grammar difficult, attempting to organize evidence from a wide variety of studies which addressed all kinds of narrowly focused questions about the acquisition of grammar, but in the process I have also documented aspects of the difficulty of specific language structures. Relatively few studies have actually attempted a systematic empirical investi- gation of difficulty by comparing acquisition for a broad range of language structures. The vast majority of studies either have a narrow linguistic focus or a very wide linguistic scope with little or no interest in comparing acquisition of different structures systematically. In principle, there are several research areas in which one could look for systematic evidencedocumentation of fossilization, ultimate attainment studies with adult learners, and research on order of acquisitionbut not all of these areas have yielded much that can help answer the question of what makes an L2 structure difficult. Fossilization is a concept that has been around for decades, but the concept has remained rather vague. If one uses a narrow definition, such as that of Long (2003), requiring that learners have been fully exposed to the L2 for at least 10 years and that lack of change for a specific structure has been systematically DeKeyser 11 documented for at least 5 years, then it turns out that only a handful of studies have met this criterion. Long (2003) cited Han (2000), Lardiere (1998, 2000), and Long (1997), which have documented fossilization of, respectively, nontarget unaccusa- tive verbs, missing verb morphology, and lexically determined inflection on nouns and verbs. Ultimate attainment studies of adult learnerswith the goal of establishing age effectshave become popular in the last decade or so, but again not many have engaged in a systematic comparison of how well different aspects of grammar have been acquired. The only studies in the morphosyntax category that have explored differential age effects for different language elements are Birdsong (1992), DeKeyser (2000), DeKeyser, Ravid, and Alfi- Shabtay (2005), Flege et al. (1999), Johnson and Newport (1989, 1991), and McDonald (2000). Both Birdsong (1992) and Johnson and Newport (1989, 1991) made a distinction between structures within and outside of the realm of universal grammar. Birdsong made a direct comparison within his study and found that both categories of structures were equally sensitive to age effects. Johnson and Newport carried out two studies, one with structures outside of Universal Grammar (UG; 1989), the other with structures exemplifying the subjacency principle, assumed to be an element of UG (1991). They found essentially the same strong age effect in both studies. It should be pointed out, however, that the UG/non-UG classification in Birdsong (1992) was tentative, as the author indicated himself, and that the classification of subjacency among the principles of UG is not uncontroversial either (Huang, 1982; Pesetsky, 1987; Rizzi, 1982). Flege et al. (1999) made a different kind of distinction. They administered an ESL grammaticality judgment test, mostly drawn from Johnson and Newport (1989), to speakers of Korean L1 and found overall age-proficiency correlations of .71 for age on arrival (AoA) <15 and .23 for AoA>15. The researchers showed, through analysis of a series of subsamples matched for AoA, that education was a significant predictor for performance 12 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? on rule-based items and use of English was a significant predictor for performance on lexically based items. Johnson and Newport (1989), DeKeyser (2000), and McDonald (2000), all using variants of the same grammaticality judgment test for English L2, found a tendency for a few elements of morphosyn- tax to be resistant to age effects, especially basic word order and yes/no questions. Moreover, both Flege et al. (1999) and McDonald (2000) found that auxiliaries, subcategorization and wh-questions were more sensitive to length of residence or other measures of usage than AoA. On the basis of such patterns and further post hoc analyses of his own data (for instance, successful acquisition of subject-verb inversion in yes-no questions, but not in wh-questions), DeKeyser (2000) hypothesized a strong role of salience, in the sense that this variable becomes increasingly important with age. One more study to mention here is Yeni-Komshian et al. (2001). Among the Korean speakers of L2 English in this study, performance was markedly worse for plural s than for third-person s, and this difference became gradually larger with increasing AoA. The authors of this study attributed the difference in correctness between noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP) to the higher salience of the VP in Korean L1 and to a transfer of processing strategies in this respect. In contrast to ultimate attainment studies, research on acquisition order, of course, has made explaining difficulty into an explicit goal, at least if one accepts that difficulty can be operationalized as order of acquisition. This type of research was prominent from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, but while researchers eventually agreed on a more or less universal order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in ESL, they could not agree on an explanation for that order (cf., e.g., Gass & Selinker, 2001; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991; Long & Sato, 1984). This lack of explanatory adequacy was probably one of the main reasons why the order-of-acquisition question for morphemes faded from the published literature in the mid-1980s. Parallel work on acquisition order of syntactic patterns such as interrogative structures (e.g., Eckman, Moravcsik, & Wirth, 1989) or relative DeKeyser 13 clauses (e.g., Eckman, Bell, & Nelson, 1988; Gass, 1979), however, pointed to markedness as a potentially important factor in determining order of acquisition/difficulty. Bardovi-Harlig (1987), on the other hand, showed that salience prevailed over markedness by comparing the acquisition of pied piping and preposition stranding in ESL. Goldschneider and DeKeyser (this volume) returned to the issue of morpheme acquisition order and found that saliencebroadly construed as a combination of phono- logical salience, semantic complexity, morphological regularity, and frequencyaccounted for a large percentage of the variance in the order of L2 acquisition. They found it impossible to tease out the contribution of the various components of salience, however, because these factors are strongly intercorrelated in English morphology. Given the evidence for the importance of salience in both the ultimate-attainment and the order-of-acquisition literatures, on the one hand, and the lack of systematic research on the role of salience in ultimate attainment by adult learners, on the other hand, DeKeyser, Ravid, and Alfi-Shabtay (2005) decided to investigate the role of salience in the acquisition of Hebrew morphology by adult immigrants. They found not only a strong effect of salience in determining difficulty (as measured by a grammaticality judgment test), but also a significant interaction with age in the sense that the role of salience grew more important with increasing age of acquisition. Further analysis of the data (DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, Ravid, & Shi, 2005) showed that several components of salience played an independent role in determining difficulty for all learners: phonological salience (length in phones and /syllabic character of the morpheme) and /homonymy with other morphemes. Two other components of salience did not show a main effect but interacted with age in the sense that they were an important predictor of learning for older learners only: distance (between morphemes in agreement patterns) and stress. In conclusion, there is increasing evidence from both the order-of-acquisition literature and the ultimate-attainment 14 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? literature that lack of salience plays an important role in acquisition difficulty. Much remains to be done in this area, however. On the one hand, it is much harder to agree on an operationalizaton of salience in syntax as opposed to morphology or phonology. On the other hand, even for morphology, there is still a lack of systematic, let alone cross-linguistic, research comparing acquisition difficulty for morphemes with different degrees of salience or different degrees of other factors mentioned above, for that matter, such as redundancy, optionality, and opacity of form- meaning mapping, novelty and abstractness of meaning, and sheer complexity of form. As research on ultimate attainment effects is accumulating, there is hope, however, that a meta-analysis of that literature may soon be able to help determine the characteristics of consistently poorly learned L2 structures. Mitigating Factors Meanwhile, additional insights on what is difficult and why come from studies that have investigated the interaction between characteristics of the L2 structures being learned and individual learner or contextual factors. While a substantial literature exists on individual differences, not much work has addressed the question of the differential impact of factors such as aptitude and motivation on specific elements within morphology and syntax, in other words, on elements char- acterized by specific types of difficulty. Two recent studies that stand out in this area, however, are Willliams (1999) and Williams and Lovatt (this volume). The findings of both studies are complex, but Williams (1999) showed that meaningful form-function mapping (in Italian L2) resulted from conceptually driven, explicit learning (a function of aptitude in the sense of grammatical sensitivity), whereas seman- tically redundant agreement rules were largely the result of data- driven, implicit learning (a function of memory). DeKeyser (2003) argued that this is because the agreement rules amounted to concrete sound-sound correspondences (even euphony), whereas DeKeyser 15 the meaningful form-function mappings required associating an element of the noun phrase with an element of the verb phrase, each element taking a very different concrete form. Associating nonmeaningful co-occurrence of concrete elements logically draws more on memory, whereas establishing meaningful relationships between abstract entities draws more on insight (cf. Gomez, 1997; Perruchet & Pacteau, 1990, 1991; Reed & Johnson, 1998). Williams and Lovatt (this volume) found that even for more abstract patterns of morpheme agreement, not involving euphony, phono- logical short-term memory played an important role; there was also evidence, however, that explicit processes were strongly involved in learning these patterns. It is interesting to compare these findings to those of Taraban (2004), who studied induction of gender-like categories in miniature linguistic systems. He did not take individual difference measures but found that learning was greatly facilitated either by providing explicit instruction or by drawing learners attention to the correlated sets of grammatical morphemes by means of blocking trials as a function of noun category. When time is limited and the pattern is made salient, explicit learning (presumably drawing on aptitude) is clearly important; when there is more time and when the pattern is far less salient, as would be the case in naturalistic language acquisition, the role of more implicit learning, relying more heavily on mere associative memory, is likely to increase. Few researchers so far seem to have ventured further and investigated how linguistic characteristics of the patterns to be acquired interact with both individual differences and instructional conditions at the same time. Robinson (2002), for instance, provided interesting data on the interaction between aptitudes, on the one hand, and linguistic characteristics of the structures to be learned, instructional conditions, or testing conditions, on the other hand, but not on the three-way interaction between linguistic characteristics, instructional conditions, and aptitudes. Robinson (1996), on the other hand, documented an interaction between linguistic characteristics 16 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? and instructional conditions (i.e., instructed learners outperformed others in learning simple rules), but he did not investigate an interaction with aptitude. Robinson (1997), however, did document a three-way interaction between structure, aptitude, and instructional condition, in the sense that the learning of easy structures was predicted by grammatical sensitivity but not by memory and the learning of complex structures by memory but not by grammatical sensitivity, for instance, and that this pattern only obtained for one of the four instructional conditions (rule search, i.e., inductive explicit learning). Implications for Instruction The nature and degree of difficulty of individual structures have a range of potential implications for instructional decision making. At the most basic level, one can argue that instruction is not necessary for the easiest structures and doomed to failure for the hardest, in particular where focus on form is concerned (cf. DeKeyser, 2003). Within form-focused instruction, however, whether it be characterized by traditional focus on forms or more narrowly defined focus on form (cf. Long & Robinson, 1998), different activities are likely to have a differential impact on different structures characterized by different learning problems. Larsen-Freeman (2003, pp. 117120), for instance, made distinctions among three kinds of activities, aimed at association (e.g., through phrase combination tasks), frequent use, and choice (e.g., in a fill-in-the blanks format). She associated these three kinds of activities with the problems of learning the meaning of a grammar structure, the form itself, or its use, respectively. Within the terminological framework I have used in the present article, one could argue that association activities are particularly useful when the learning issue is one of form-meaning mapping, that frequent use should be the goal when the problem is one of semantically redundant form-form mapping, and that choice among forms should be the focus of the activity when novel meanings are at issue. DeKeyser 17 Much empirical work needs to be done in order to test hypotheses such as these, but they should provide a useful starting point for research that goes beyond the simplistic question of whether explicit grammar teaching and systematic practice are useful for L2 grammar learning. The Articles in This Volume The four articles that follow were all published in Language Learning between 1999 and 2003. They are all about the acquisition of L2 morphology. Three are about the acquisition of gender in particular: Kempe and Brooks demonstrate how diminutives facilitate gender acquisition in Russian L2 by eliminating nontransparent morphophonological marking. Carroll shows that gender acquisition in French L2 is largely determined by the semantic distinctions the learner makes on the basis of previous linguistic experience. Williams and Lovatt document the role of individual differences, in particular, phonological short-term memory, in the acquisition of gender in a semiartificial miniature linguistic system. These three studies illustrate with different methodologies and with different languages how factors such as consistency of form-meaning mapping, semantically driven insights derived from prior linguistic knowledge, and the learners phonological short-term memory all play an important role in solving a difficult problem in acquisition: form-meaning mapping, in which the form is complex and the meaning redundant, abstract, and novel. Together with Goldschneider and DeKeysers meta-analysis of a wider range of morphological elements, these studies show how success in L2 acquisition is strongly influenced by (a) how transparent the form-meaning link is to the learner, either because of the salience of the linguistic structure itself or because its apperception is facilitated by the structure or the frequency of the input, or (b) the learners aptitudes and previous linguistic experience. 18 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? References Andersen, R. W., & Shirai, Y. (1994). Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 133156. Andersen, R. W., & Shirai, Y. (1996). The primacy of aspect in first and second language acquisition: The pidgin-creole connection. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 527570). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Ayoun, D. (2004). The effectiveness of written recasts in the second language acquisition of aspectual distinctions in French: A follow-up study. Modern Language Journal, 88, 3155. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1987). Markedness and salience in second-language acquisition. Language Learning, 37, 385407. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1998). Narrative structure and lexical aspect: Conspiring factors in second language acquisition of tense-aspect morphology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20, 471508. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1999). From morpheme studies to temporal semantics: Tense-aspect research in SLA. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 341382. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2000). Tense and aspect in second language acquisition: Form, meaning, and use. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bley-Vroman, R., & Joo, H.-R. (2001). The acquisition and interpretation of English locative constructions by native speakers of Korean. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 207219. Birdsong, D. (1992). Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition. Language, 68, 706755. Butler, Y. G. (2002). Second language learners theories on the use of English articles: An analysis of the metalinguistic knowledge used by Japanese students in acquiring the English article system. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 451480. Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teachers course. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. Collins, L. (2002). The roles of L1 influence and lexical aspect in the acquisition of temporal morphology. Language Learning, 52, 4394. DeKeyser, R. M. (2000). The robustness of critical period effects in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 499533. DeKeyser, R. M. (2003). Implicit and explicit learning. In C. Doughty & M. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 313348). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. DeKeyser 19 DeKeyser, R. M. (2005). Monitoring processes in Spanish as a second language during a study abroad program. Manuscript in preparation. DeKeyser, R. M., Alfi-Shabtay, I., Ravid, D., & Shi, M. (2005). The role of salience in the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language. Manuscript in preparation. DeKeyser, R. M., Ravid, D., & Alfi-Shabtay, I. (2005). Cross-linguistic evidence for the nature of age effects in second language acquisition. Manuscript in preparation. DeKeyser, R. M., Salaberry, R., Robinson, P., & Harrington, M. (2002). What gets processed in processing instruction? A commentary on Bill VanPattens Processing Instruction: An Update. Language Learning, 52, 805823. Dietrich, R., Klein, W., & Noyau, C. (1995). The acquisition of temporality in a second language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Eckman, F. R., Bell, L., & Nelson, D. (1988). On the generalization of relative clause instruction in the acquisition of English as a second language. Applied Linguistics, 9, 120. Eckman, F. R., Moravcsik, E. A., & Wirth, J. R. (1989). Implicational universals and interrogative structures in the interlanguage of ESL learners. Language Learning, 39, 173205. Ellis, N. (2002). Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 143188. Ellis, N. (2003). Constructions, chunking, and connectionism: The emergence of second language structure. In C. J. Doughty &M. H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 63103). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Ellis, R. (1990). Instructed second language acquisition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Flege, J. E., Yeni-Komshian, G. H., &Liu, S. (1999). Age constraints on second- language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 78104. Gass, S. M. (1979). Language transfer and universal grammatical relations. Language Learning, 29, 327344. Gass, S. M., & Selinker, L. (2001). Second language acquisition. An intro- ductory course. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Gomez, R. L. (1997). Transfer and complexity in artificial grammar learning. Cognitive Psychology, 33, 154207. Han, Z. (2000). Persistence of the implicit influence of NL: The case of the pseudo-passive. Applied Linguistics, 21(1), 5582. Hansen, L., & Chen, Y. L. (2001). What counts in the acquisition and attribution of numeral classifiers? JALT Journal, 23, 90110. Herschensohn, J. (2000). The second time around: Minimalism and L2 acquisition. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 20 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? Hertel, T. J. (2003). Lexical and discourse factors in the second language acquisition of Spanish word order. Second Language Research, 19, 273304. Huang, C.-T. (1982). Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Inagaki, S. (1997). Japanese and Chinese learners acquisition of the narrow-range rules for the dative alternation in English. Language Learning, 47, 637669. Inagaki, S. (2001). Motion verbs with goal PPs in the L2 acquisition of English and Japanese. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 153170. Ishida, M. (2004). Effects of recasts on the acquisition of the aspectual form -te i-(ru) by learners of Japanese as a foreign language. Language Learning, 54, 311394. Jarvis, S. (2002). Topic continuity in L2 English article use. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 387418. Jiang, N. (2004). Morphological insensitivity in second language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 603634. Johnson, J. S., & Newport, E. L. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 20, 6099. Johnson, J. S., & Newport, E. L. (1991). Critical period effects on universal properties of language: The status of subjacency in the acquisition of a second language. Cognition, 39, 215258. Joo, H.-R. (2003). Second language learnability and the acquisition of English locative verbs by Korean speakers. Second Language Research, 19, 305328. Juffs, A. (1996). Semantics-syntax correspondences in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 12, 177221. Juffs, A. (1998). The acquisition of semantics-syntax correspondences and verb frequencies in EL materials. Language Teaching Research, 2, 93123. Jung, E. H. (2004). Topic and subject prominence in interlanguage development. Language Learning, 54, 713738. Kempe, V., & MacWhinney, B. (1998). The acquisition of case marking by adult learners of Russian and German. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20, 543587. Klein, W., & Dittmar, N. (1979). Developing grammars. Berlin: Springer. Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Krashen, S. D., & Pon, P. (1975). An error analysis of and advanced ESL learner. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 7, 125129. DeKeyser 21 Lardiere, D. (1998). Case and tense in the fossilized steady-state. Second Language Research, 14, 126. Lardiere, D. (2000). Mapping features to forms in second language acquisition. In J. Archibald (Ed.), Second language acquisition and linguistic theory (pp. 102129). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2003). Teaching language: From grammar to grammaring. Boston: Heinle. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Long, M. H. (1991). An introduction to second language acquisition research. New York: Longman. Lee, E.-J. (2001). Interlanguage development by two Korean speakers of English with a focus on temporality. Language Learning, 51, 591633. Leeman, J. (2003). Recasts and second language development: Beyond negative evidence. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 3763. Liceras, J. M. (1989). On some properties of the pro-drop parameter: Looking for missing subjects in nonnative Spanish. In S. Gass &J. Schachter (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on second language acquisition (pp. 109133). New York: Cambridge University Press. Liu, D., & Gleason, J. L. (2002). Acquisition of the article the by nonnative speakers of English: An analysis of four nongeneric uses. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 126. Long, M. H. (1997). Fossilization: Rigor mortis in living linguistic systems? Plenary address to the EUROSLA 97 conference, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. Long, M. H. (2003). Stabilization and fossilization in interlanguage development. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 487535). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Long, M. H., & Robinson, P. (1998). Focus on form: Theory, research, and practice. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 1541). New York: Cambridge University Press. Long, M. H., & Sato, C. (1984). Methodological issues in interlanguage studies: An interactionist perspective. In A. Davies, C. Criper, & A. P. R. Howatt (Eds.), Interlanguage (pp. 253279). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. MacWhinney, B. (2001). The competition model: The input, the context, and the brain. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 6990). New York: Cambridge University Press. MacWhinney, B. (in press). A unified model of language acquisition. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycho- linguistic approaches. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 22 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? Master, P. (1997). The English article system: Acquisition, function, and pedagogy. System, 25, 215232. McDonald, J. L. (1987). Sentence interpretation in bilingual speakers of English and Dutch. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 379414. McDonald, J. L. (2000). Grammaticality judgments in a second language: Influences of age of acquisition and native language. Applied Psycholin- guistics, 21, 395423. Montrul, S. (2001). Agentive verbs of manner of motion in Spanish and English as second languages. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 171206. Montrul, S., & Slabakova, R. (2003). Competence similarities between native and near-native speakers: An investigation of the preterite-imperfect contrast in Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 351398. Papp, S. (2000). Stable and developmental optionality in native and non-native Hungarian grammars. Second Language Research, 16, 173200. Perruchet, P., & Pacteau, C. (1990). Synthetic grammar learning: Implicit rule abstraction or explicit fragmentary knowledge? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119, 264275. Perruchet, P., & Pacteau, C. (1991). Implicit acquisition of abstract knowledge about artificial grammar: Some methodological and conceptual issues. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 120, 112116. Pesetsky, D. (1987). Wh-in-situ: Movement and unselective binding. In E. Reuland & A. G. B. ter Meulen (Eds.), The representation of indefinite- ness (pp. 98129). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pienemann, M. (1984). Psychological constraints on the teachability of languages. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 6, 186214. Pienemann, M. (2003). Language processing capacity. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 679714). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Prevost, P., & White, L. (2000). Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16, 103133. Reed, J. M., &Johnson, P. J. (1998). Implicit learning: Methodological issues and evidence of unique characteristics. In M. A. Stadler & P. A. Frensch (Eds.), Handbook of implicit learning (pp. 261294). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian syntax. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris. Robertson, D. (2000). Variability in the use of the English article system by Chinese learners of English. Second Language Research, 16, 135172. DeKeyser 23 Robinson, P. (1996). Learning simple and complex second language rules under implicit, incidental, rule-search, and instructed conditions. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 2767. Robinson, P. (1997). Individual differences and the fundamental similarity of implicit and explicit adult second language learning. Language Learning, 47(1), 4599. Robinson, P. (2002). Effects of individual differences in intelligence, aptitude, and working memory on adult incidental SLA: A replication and extension of Reber, Walkenfield, and Hernstadt (1991). In P. Robinson (Ed.), Individual differences and instructed language learning (pp. 211265). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Salaberry, R. (2000). The development of past tense morphology in L2 Spanish. Philadelphia: Benjamins. Sorace, A. (2000). Syntactic optionality in non-native grammars. Second Language Research, 16, 93102. Sorace, A. (2003). Near-nativeness. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 130151). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Sorace, A., & Shomura, Y. (2001). Lexical constraints on the acquisition of split intransitivity: Evidence from L2 Japanese. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 247278. Sprouse, R. (1998). Some notes on the relationship between inflectional morphology and parameter setting in first and second language acquisition. In M. Beck (Ed.), Morphology and its interfaces in second language knowledge (pp. 4167). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Stockwell, R. P., Bowen, J. D., & Martin, J. W. (1965). The grammatical structures of English and Spanish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taraban, R. (2004). Drawing learners attention to syntactic context aids gender- like category induction. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 202216. Tarone, E. E. (1985). Variability in interlanguage use: A study of style-shifting in morphology and syntax. Language Learning, 35, 373404. Tarone, E. E., & Parrish, B. (1988). Task-related variation in interlan- guage: The case of articles. Language Learning, 38, 2144. Thomas, M. (1989). The acquisition of English articles by first- and second- language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 335355. Truscott, J., & Sharwood Smith, M. (2004). Acquisition by processing: A modular perspective on language development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 120. VanPatten, B. (1990). Attending to form and content in the input: An experiment in consciousness. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 12, 287301. 24 What Makes Learning L2 Grammar Difficult? VanPatten, B. (2002a). Processing instruction: An update. Language Learning, 52, 755803. VanPatten, B. (2002b). Processing the content of input-processing and processing instruction research: A response to DeKeyser, Salaberry, Robinson, and Harrington. Language Learning, 52, 825831. VanPatten, B. (2004). Input processing in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten (Ed.), Processing instruction: Theory, research, and commentary (pp. 531). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Whong-Barr, M., & Schwartz, B. D. (2002). Morphological and syntactic transfer in child L2 acquisition of the English dative alternation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 579616. Williams, J. N. (1999). Memory, attention, and inductive learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 148. Wong, W. (2001). Modality and attention to meaning and form in the input. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 345368. Yeni-Komshian, G., Robbins, M., & Flege, J. E. (2001). Effects of word class differences on L2 pronunciation accuracy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 283299. Young, R. (1996). Form-function relationships in articles in English inter- language. In R. Bayley & D. Preston (Eds.), Second language acquisition and linguistic variation (pp. 135175). Amsterdam: Benjamins. DeKeyser 25