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SOME NOTES ON THE SHALLOW STRUCTURE HYPOTHESIS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2017

Harald Clahsen  and
Claudia Felser
Harald Clahsen*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam, Germany
Claudia Felser
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam, Germany
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Harald Clahsen, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Since the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) was first put forward in 2006, it has inspired a growing body of research on grammatical processing in nonnative (L2) speakers. More than 10 years later, we think it is time for the SSH to be reconsidered in the light of new empirical findings and current theoretical assumptions about human language processing. The purpose of our critical commentary is twofold: to clarify some issues regarding the SSH and to sketch possible ways in which this hypothesis might be refined and improved to better account for L1 and L2 speakers’ performance patterns.

Type
Critical Commentary
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 693 - 706
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Our work on this article has been supported by an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship to Harald Clahsen. We thank the SSLA editors and reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments on earlier versions of our manuscript.

References

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