This paper considers the question of explanation in second language acquisition within the context of two approaches to universals, Universal Grammar and language typology. After briefly discussing the logic of explaining facts by including them under general laws (Hempel & Oppenheim 1948), the paper makes a case for the typological approach to explanation being the more fruitful, in that it allows more readily for the possibility of ‘explanatory ascent’, the ability to propose more general, higher order explanations by having lower-level generalizations follow from more general principles. The UG approach, on the other hand is less capable of such explanatory ascent because of the postulation that the innate, domain-specific principles of UG are not reducible in any interesting way to higher order principles of cognition (Chomsky 1982).
2012. Reduction and Frequency Analyses of Vowels and Consonants in the Buckeye Speech Corpus. Phonetics and Speech Sciences 4:3 ► pp. 75 ff.
Yang, Byunggon
2019. Phonological processes of consonants from orthographic to pronounced
words in the Buckeye Corpus*. Phonetics and Speech Sciences 11:4 ► pp. 55 ff.
Yang, Byunggon
2020. Phonological processes of consonants from orthographic to pronounced
words in the Seoul Corpus*. Phonetics and Speech Sciences 12:2 ► pp. 1 ff.
Rothman, Jason
2008. Why All Counter‐Evidence to the Critical Period Hypothesis in Second Language Acquisition Is not Equal or Problematic. Language and Linguistics Compass 2:6 ► pp. 1063 ff.
Moravcsik, Edith A
2007. What is universal about typology?. Linguistic Typology 11:1
Shirai, Yasuhiro & Hiromi Ozeki
2007. INTRODUCTION. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 29:02
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