ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the debate on Universal grammar (UG) accessibility in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in an experiment investigating how reflexives are acquired by Spanish and Chinese speaking learners of English and by English-speaking learners of Spanish and Chinese. It shows that an L2 learner's linguistic competence goes beyond the available input while remaining in line with UG principles. The intuitive basis of the Head Movement Analysis (HMA) is found in a typological universal tendency according to which only certain types of reflexives display long-distance binding properties and are bound exclusively to subject antecedents. The chapter reports on a research hypotheses study, testing the availability of UG to L2 learners concerning principles of Binding Theory, based on the HMA that assumes reflexive binding properties to be syntactically related to each other.
