Verwervingsvolgorde In Het Nederlands Als Tweede Taal: Een onderzoek naar de bruikbaarheid van Pienemanns 'Processability'-theorie als verklarend en voorspellend model

The assumption that L2 acquisition is constrained by processing is the basis for several approaches to SLA. Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) is one of them (Pienemann, 1998; 2005). PT is a universal framework that predicts the order in which certain morphological and syntactic phenomena of a specific language are acquired. The current paper presents the results of a test of the validity of PT for L2 Dutch. For this study I elicited utterances of 32 foreign students learning Dutch. Three phenomena were chosen for this test: (i) attributive adjective-noun agreement; (ii) subject-verb agreement in main clauses: (iii) the placement of conjugated verbs in subordinate clauses. These phenomena are located at successive developmental stages in the hierarchy predicted by PT. The presented results appear not to support PT and raise questions about the predictions made by the theory.