Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

Table 4 (cont.)
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III. Studies with seven countable grammatical morphemes:
Rank order
Study correlation
Cheo 0.712
Juan 0.368
Jorge 9 0.769
Jorge 13 0.862
Jorge 15 0.726
Holdich 0.726
Alberto 0.730
Birnbaum et al., Free I 0.726
Birnbaum et al., Edit. I 0.802
Birnbaum et al., Free II 0.557
Birnbaum et al., Edit. II 0.712
de Villiers, 1974-agrammatics combined 0.880
Agrammatics:
A3 0.955
A50 0.599
A14 0.962
A43 time I 0.749
A43 time II 0.755
A5 0.637
A24 0.768
A6 0.805
for n = 7, significance at 0.05 level requires rho = 0.714 or larger.
significance at 0.01 level requires rho = 0.893 or larger.
(one-tail)
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a: All individual cross-sections listed, with the exception of Uguisu
(Hakuta, 1974) and Holdich (Holdich, 1976), and the agrammatics, are
from Rosansky (1976).
b: All correlations have been corrected for ties.
A final objection that has been raised is that merely dealing with morphemes in
obligatory occasions may fail to reveal at least some aspects of language
acquisition, the overgeneralizations, and the transitional forms that acquirers go
through. This is, I think, perfectly true, but does not detract at all from the validity
of the results of the morpheme studies. The observed morpheme order is the result
of the interplay of the underlying process of acquisition, and they only show the
product, the surface order of acquisition. They do not directly reveal the pathway
the acquirer took in arriving there. Nevertheless, there is no reason to assume the
obtained order is invalid; it has been shown to be highly reliable, and occurs for the
adult, in predictable
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