specification of form-meaning correspondences, there must also be a syntax-semantics interface in second-language (L2) acquisition. If the epistemological status of interlanguage knowledge is substantially different from that of native language (first-language or L1) knowledge, the precise idiosyncratic properties of the interpretive interface arising in natural languages are not expected to arise in L2 acquisition.Indeed, the natural language syntax-semantics interface appears to reflect the specific niche occupied by natural language grammars among formal grammatical systems (Van Benthem (1991)). In particular, permutations of word order induce a variety of interpretive reflexes of the specific character of grammatical knowledge in mental architecture. Following Jackendoff (1997), we assume that aspects of knowledge of language follow from the organization of grammar into discrete, domain-specific, informationally encapsulated modules (syntax, semantics, phonology, etc.) with their primitives and principles of combination. 1,2 In this article, we investigate the effect of modular design on L2 acquisition by considering the interpretation of continuous and discontinuous combien 'how many' extractions in English-French interlanguage. 3

Evidence from young children's early phonological development is brought to bear on the evaluation of a newly proposed type of correspondence relation within optimality theory (McCarthy and Prince (1995), Prince and Smolensky (1993)) namely sympathy. Sympathy has been advanced to account for certain opacity effects in fully developed languages. Given the claims of the theory, comparable opacity effects are expected to occur in the course of acquisition. Toward this end, different interactions of two common phenomena-that is, final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants-are examined with a focus on a case study of 2 young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. We argue that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects naturally emerge in the course of development from the harmonic ranking of sympathy over input-output faithfulness and the incremental demotion of markedness constraints.

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