Grammatical Morphemes of Adult L2 Learners in Formal Environments

A second statement which has captured the attention of researchers in second language acquisition in the past few years is the claim that second language learners, regardless of native language background, acquire certain English grammatical morphemes in stmi1ar sequence. This idea originated with Brown (1973) and his first language acquisition studies with children. Brown's longitudinal study with three unacquainted American children reported that there existed a developmental sequence of fourteen morphemes. This sequence was revealed by a procedure where the particular morphemes were scored for suppliance in obligatory contexts. A later cross-sectional study conducted by deVi11iers and deVi11iers (1973), colleagues of Brown·s at Harvard, reported a high degree of cor-respondence between the orderings in their cross-sectional study and the orderings reported by Brown for the same fourteen morphemes. Heidi C. Dulay and Marina K. Burt (1973) adopted Brown's procedure and a subset of his morphemes to find if such an order existed for chil