As indicated in Chapter Two, during its history, Chinese underwent a dramatic typological change from being a rigid wh-movement language to being a complete wh- in situ language. Roughly speaking, in the period of Old Chinese, wh-words used as objects needed to be fronted to the preverbal position , though Chinese was an SVO language, like English . However, during the first half of Middle Chinese, wh- movements were gradually replaced by wh- in situ.

This chapter lays the foundation for how the field of second language acquisition arose. We briefly review the pioneering work in the late 1950s and 1960s in first language acquisition (e.g., Berko Gleason, Brown, Klima & Bellugi). We also review the generative revolution in linguistics and how it laid the groundwork for the idea of constrained language acquisition. We then review the seminal articles by S. Pit Corder (1967) and Larry Selinker (1972) that posited the major questions in second language acquisition, and end with the pioneering work that mirrored first language acquisition (e.g., Dulay & Burt, Krashen, Wode). We end the chapter with the major question that launched second language research in the early 1970s: Are first and second language acquisition similar or different?