Investigates whether intermediate Turkish-speaking and English-speaking learners of Spanish know which unaccusative verbs alternate in transitivity and which ones do not, and whether they find causative errors natural with intransitive verbs. Results confirm similar findings to those reported in English interlanguage and first-language acquisition…

Presents three related experiments on the acquisition of two classes of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs with agentive subjects and psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects in English, Spanish, and Turkish as second languages by speakers whose native languages are English, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese.…

Analyzes data on the acquisition of German by Italian and Spanish speakers. Findings reveal that children learning a first language and adults learning a second language build up syntactic structure in much the same manner, and propose that the weak continuity approach of language acquisition accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.…