Results and theoretical implications

This chapter reports the findings and offers a discussion of these findings in terms of markedness theory, L1 influences, IL restructuring, and L2 input. The findings confirm the implicational hierarchy of processing stages; however, variation was found between structures belonging to the same stage (intra-stage variation). The findings also report the sequence of acquisition between seven syntactic structures, and an implicational relationship between four agreement combinations is reported. The chapter ends with a discussion of the theoretical implication of these findings on SAL theory.