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We analyzed some earlier studies of English L1 and L2 morpheme orders, basing our analysis' on current functional categories theory. Our analysis meets two long-standing charges against morpheme order data; namely, that the heterogeneity of the morphemes does not yield up any insights into L2 acquisition and that the English language-based orders lack generalizability.We suggest that the salient differences between the L1 and the L2 orders reduce to a number of simple contrasts.These involve (a) the category-specific emergence of.functional categories in -L1 versus their cross-category development in L2; (b) an L2 ordering hinging crucially on the lexical head versus inflectional. head distinction in L2 and its absence in L1; (c) the at least coequal, or'possibly even spearheading, role that inflections play vis-h-vis free functi~nal categories in L1 versus the earlier and independent emergence of the latter in L2; and (d) the apparently An earlier versionof this paper was presented at the 1993 Second Language Research Forum, University of F'ittsbu@, [19][20][21] March. Requests for reprints may be sent to Jqana Liceras, Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Ottawa, Post Omce Box 450, Station A, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5. Telephone: (613) 564-2305. Bitnek JLiceras@UOttawa 159 '160 Language Learning Vol. 44, No. 1 greater difficulty that affix-movement poses for L2 learners. The past years have seen a resurgence of interest in.-the distinction between the contentlfunction o r opedclosed grammatical categories. Thh distinction has a long tradition in the -at,lLa 1 ~,+>32i,-kigtxag~ ~~& d L i h y . l j l ;%.owir & , 19631, processing (Garrett, 1990;Kimball, 1973) and agrammatism (Kean, 1985). In current linguistic theory (Chomsky, 1991;Ouhalla, 1991;Pollock 1989) phrasal structure is projected from those elements that pajicipate in' theta-marking relationships and from functional categories. (The former comprise predicates and their arguments; the latter comprise free morphemes such as modals, auxiliaries, determiners, complementizers, and bound morphemes such as nominal and verbal affixes.) This current theory has inspired several hypotheses concerning first and second language acquisition. Specifically, it has been proposed for English L1 Fraser

The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition research. In bilingual acquisition a central learnability issue has been to determine whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns. In this article, the authors analyse the omission/production of subject pronouns in the developing Spanish grammar and of copula be in the developing English grammar of two EnglishSpanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the issues of the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. The authors argue that the directionality of interlinguistic influence is determined by the need to implement core operations of the computational system and that the lexical-semantic interface is an area of the grammar where interlinguistic influence occurs.

We have argued that the grammatical features spell-out hypothesis (GFSH) (Liceras, Spradlin, Perales, Fernández, & Álvarez, 2003; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003a) accounts for the functional-lexical mixing patterns that prevail in the case of Determiner Phrases produced by bilingual (English-Spanish) children. This hypothesis (Liceras, 2002; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003b) states that in the process of activating the features of the two grammars, the child, who will rely on the two lexicons, will make codemixing choices which will favor the functional categories containing the largest array of uninterpretable features (Chomsky, 1998, 1999). This implies that in the case of English/ Spanish child acquisition data, mixed utterances such as el book (Spanish Determiner + English Noun) will prevail over mixed utterances such as the libro (English Determiner + Spanish Noun). Thus, in the process of acquisition, children pay special attention to the visible morpho-phonological triggers which lead to the activation of abstract formal features.