L1 Transfer and UG Accessibility in SLA

This study presents evidence of first language (L I) transfer and partial access to Universal Grammar (UG) in the acquisition of second language (L2) after puberty, concerning the acquisition of Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) by Korean leamers of English. Fifty Korean undergraduate students participated in a preference task and a doze task to show their preference between elided phrases and proforms. Among the participants, five students were interviewed after the tasks for the purpose of investigating reasons for their preference. The Korean participants' performances were then compared with those of five English native speaker controls. The results indicate that the participants' differences in the performance of the tasks are attributed to full transfer of their native language and partial access to UG. It is also verified that although second language leamers are exposed to any particular L2 for an extended period of time, they may never fully acquire the same syntactic representations as native speakers.