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Birdsong, David1
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Uninterpretable Features: Psychology and Plasticity in Second Language Learnability
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Birdsong, David – Second Language Research, 2009
This commentary addresses the relevance of detectability to a theory of learning uninterpretable features in the second language (L2). Detectability of features is illustrated in an application of Signal Detection Theory. By analogy with development of phonemic categories in the first language (L1), the notion of paring down the repertoire of…
Descriptors: Learning Theories, Second Language Learning, Language Acquisition, Phonemes