The bottleneck hypothesis Sample Clauses

The bottleneck hypothesis. According to The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Xxxxxxxxx, 2008), functional morphology is challenging to acquire in L2 and Ln acquisition. The hypothesis holds that differences in languages are located in the functional categories, which is also where most language’s functional morphology is found (Xxxxxx et al., 2019, 2; Xxxxxxxxx, 2016, 391). Functional morphology holds much linguistic information and the fact that this aspect is highly varied across languages, makes it a probable source for errors in the language learner. This is in contrast to other linguistic domains, like core syntax, which presumptively is universal in all languages, in the sense that movement obeys the same restrictions (Xxxxxx, 2019, 2). The effects are that functional morphology acts as a bottleneck for L2 production because it affects the acceptability and meaning of the whole sentence (Slabakova, 2021, 321). Studies on the bottleneck hypothesis have shown that L2 learners do in fact have less accuracy when judging grammaticality related to functional morphology than core syntax. One of these studies is highlighted in Xxxxxx et al. (2019) described earlier in this section. In Xxxxxxxxx (2019), the author argues that semantics and core syntax are acquired through little effort contra functional morphology, which requires more effort. The author concludes by stating that difficulties in L2 acquisition mainly stem from language architecture and crosslinguistic variation, while frequency, redundancy, and saliency do have an effect, however, it is not crucial.