The Comparative Fallacy in UG Studies

In his well-known paper, Bley-Vroman (1983) discusses the potentially harmful effect of the comparative fallacy, in which " the linguistic description of learners' language may be seriously hindered or sidetracked by a concern with the target language " (p. 2). In order to avoid the problem, he urges researchers to focus on linguistic descriptions of learners' languages with respect to their own logic, rather than comparing them with those of native speakers (NSs). Similarly, Cook (1999) cautions that many second language acquisition (SLA) research methods, such as grammaticality judgments, obligatory occurrences, and error analysis, involve comparing the second language (L2) speaker's language with that of a native speaker. He also argues against measuring the success or failure of an L2 learner's language use against native norms. Such arguments on the comparative fallacy (CF) are well-grounded, especially with regard to studies which employ direct comparison of a learner's performance with NS norms. However, it may also be the case that the use of NS criterion could be useful in some studies, especially in Universal Grammar (UG)-related studies which focus on the nature of learners' mental representations or interlanguage grammar (ILG), rather than their performance. In what follows, two studies will be reviewed in order to illustrate that using NS competence as a point of reference may be useful, efficient, and sometimes inevitable, especially in studies pertaining to UG and ultimate attainment, which aim to uncover the source or nature of the learner's interlanguage grammar. UG is a system of innate principles and parameters, which places limitations on an individual's grammar(s), constraining their form as well as how they operate (White, 1998). It thus serves as a constraint on the kinds of grammar that can be created, thereby limiting the hypothesis-testing space that learners use in creating language knowledge (Gass, 1997). The postulation of UG was motivated by the logical problem of language acquisition, which essentially refers to the phenomenon wherein an individual's knowledge of language, or competence, is underdetermined by the input he or she is exposed to. Earlier L2 studies under this framework often sought to investigate the availability of UG in the learners' ILG by looking at whether a particular principle constrains the ILG. A classic example is Schachter's (1989) oft-cited study on subjacency, which investigates the operation (or non-operation) of UG in adult L2 learners. She hypothesized that a strong case for the operation of UG in SLA …