WHAT DOES THE IMPACT OF FREQUENCY TELL US ABOUT THE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE?
Jan H. Hulstijn a1c1 a1 University of Amsterdam c1 Jan Hulstijn, Department of Second Language Acquisition, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam, The Netherlands; e-mail: hulstijn@hum.uva.nl.
This peer commentary emphasizes the importance of placing frequency in an overarching theoretical framework of language acquisition. Three issues are raised that appear to be both important and timely: (a) the question of how innate, or initial, cognition can deal with stimulus frequency; (b) the likelihood that frequency has a differential impact depending on the type of knowledge concerned; and (c) preliminary evidence that frequency affects receptive language knowledge more than productive knowledge, which raises the issue of a possible dissociation between the two knowledge types.
