Publications

In this chapter we explore the different predictions made by the Access/No Access hypotheses on the role of UG and the L1 in L2 acquisition in the light of data obtained from an oral production task eliciting L2 English long-distance (LD) wh-questions of the type in (1) : (1) Who do you think John loves? Section 2 briefly surveys the different options for LD wh-question formation crosslinguistically in order to show some possibilities attested in natural languages and made available by UG. Special emphasis will be placed on the languages directly related to this investigation: English, our learners’ target language, Basque and Spanish, their L1s. Section 3 reports on the findings in the acquisition literature on LD wh-questions, specially on the L1 English study carried out by Thornton (1990) and L2 acquisition data by L1 Japanese learners (Wakabayashi & Okawara, 2003; Yamane, 2003), and specific predictions are put forward. In section 4 the participants and elicitation procedure are described. Section 5 features the results and sections 6 and 7 the discussion and conclusion.