The uncertainty principle in second language acquisition

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents three themes that I have discussed with Mike Long on different occasions in recent years: The Discontinuity Hypothesis, the necessity to study the ‘intra-language’ (in addition to the ‘interlanguage’) and the uncertainty principle. The latter is the idea that abstract rules and statistical regularities are entangled states of mind in a L2 learner’s competence, to the extent that researchers can never know whether learners are recognizing a morphosyntactic form (due to its frequency) or they are generating that form by a rule (due to abstract ‘labels that predate the input’). Uncertainty implies that what we can uncover about a learner’s implicit competence depends on how such competence is measured.

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