Access to universal grammar in second-language acquisition: Data from the interpretation of null arguments in Japanese

This paper reports on an experimental study that examines whether UG is accessible to adult learners of Japanese as a second language. The study, focuses on the acquisition of a (UG) principle regulating the interpretation of null arguments in Japanese. An important property of null arguments in Japanese is that a null subject in an embedded clause can refer freely to the matrix subject, but a null object cannot. Not only did the L2 learners exhibit a statistically significant difference in their interpretation of null subjects and null objects, consistent with the UG principle, their performance was not significantly different from that of a native-speaker control group.