Agreement and null subjects in German L2 development: new evidence from reaction-time experiments

Abstract

In L1 acquisition research, developmental correlations between superfi cially unrelated linguistic phenomena are analysed in terms of clustering effects, resulting from the setting of a particular parameter of Universal Grammar (UG). In German L1 acquisition, there is evidence for a cluster ing of the acquisition of subject-verb agreement and the decrease of (incor rect) null subjects. The developmental connection between these two phenomena in L1 acquisition has been interpreted in terms of parameter setting. Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994) have claimed that the acqui sition of subject-verb agreement and non-pro-drop in adult L2 learners developmentally coincides in the same way as it does in child L1 learners. This is taken to indicate that UG parameters are fully accessible to adult L2 learners. In this article we will report on reaction-time (RT) experi ments investigating subject-verb agreement and null subjects in 33 Korean learners of German and a control group of 20 German native speakers. Our main finding is that the two phenomena do not covary in the Korean learners indicating that (contra Vainikka and Young-Scholten) properties of agreement and null subjects are acquired separately from one another, rather than through parameter resetting.