A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School

2.3 Catching them Young

Influenced by Brown's work (1973) on the acquisition order of morphemes,
Dulay & Burt (1973, 1974, 1976) and Hakuta (1974,1978) investigated the
acquisition of English morphemes by second language learners. Hakuta
studying a Japanese girl acquiring English and Dulay & Burt studying Chinese-
and Spanish-speaking children acquiring English as a second language in the
United States found that all the children acquired a set of English morphemes in
an order similar to the order in which English native-speaking children acquire
these morphemes. Dulay & Burt concluded that if children acquired a second
language in the same order as native-speakers do, the same underlying
mechanisms had to be at play and the acquisition of a second language had to
be similar to that of a first language. The result of their studies was the
'L1=L2^, hypothesis which postulated that similar universal language processing
strategies underlied both first and second language acquisition. A 'creative
construction process' in second language acquisition was claimed to allow
children to :

ⁿ ...gradually reconstruct rules for the speech that they hear, guided by innate
mechanisms which cause them to use certain strategies to organize that
linguistic input, until the mismatch between the language system they are
exposed to and what they produce is resolved." (Dulay & Burt, 1976: 75)

An invariant order of acquisition was proposed which was not affected by
instruction or by interference from first language syntactic patterns and it was
claimed that:

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