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Second Language Acquisition Theory: The legacy of Professor Michael H. Long
Edited by Alessandro G. Benati and John W. Schwieter
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 14] 2022
► pp. 101–112

Chapter 5
The uncertainty principle in second language acquisition

 | Università di Pavia, Italy
This chapter presents three themes that I have discussed with Mike Long on different occasions in recent years: The Discontinuity Hypothesis, the necessity to study the ‘intra-language’ (in addition to the ‘interlanguage’) and the uncertainty principle. The latter is the idea that abstract rules and statistical regularities are entangled states of mind in a L2 learner’s competence, to the extent that researchers can never know whether learners are recognizing a morphosyntactic form (due to its frequency) or they are generating that form by a rule (due to abstract ‘labels that predate the input’). Uncertainty implies that what we can uncover about a learner’s implicit competence depends on how such competence is measured.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Mike and science
  • 2.Rationalism continued
  • 3.Second language development could be twofold
  • 4.Second language acquisition research could benefit from the study of intra-language
  • 5.Language competence could be permanently re-assembled and rehearsed during online performance
  • 6.The knowability issue
  • 7.The uncertainly principle and second language development
  • 8.Arrivederci
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bpa.14.05ras
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