Defective adjectival inflection in non-native German: Prosodic transfer or missing surface inflection?

Two recent hypotheses which support the theory of full access to Universal Grammar have been proposed in order to account for variant data supplied by L2 learners. The Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (Goad, White & Steele 2003) suggests that non-target-like behaviour by L2 learners is partially due to the differences in prosody between the L1 and L2 and the ensuing prosodic constraints; whilst the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000) proposes that problems are due to the learners’ variability in mapping abstract syntactic features onto morphological forms. This paper discusses a study of Japanese native speakers acquiring L3 German adjectival inflection in light of these two hypotheses. Data are provided from a written gap-filling task and from two oral production tasks. The results indicate stronger support for the MSIH.