This study investigates the morphosyntactic competence of advanced ESL learners and native speakers of English. Using the framework of the Government and Binding approach (Chomsky,1981, 1986), the study tests the predictions made by the evolved Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman, 2009), namely that the grammars of advanced L2 learners are unreliable(where reliability means converging to the L2 grammar), non-convergent to the L2 grammar, and characteristic of patches (where patches are extragrammatical principles independent of the normal syntactic processes). The participants of the study were tested on three tasks (timed grammaticality judgment task, a correction task, and a preference task). The findings of the study indicate that the difference between the morphosyntactic competence of the advanced ESL learners and that of native speakers is gradient rather than categorical.

This study investigates the morphosyntactic competence of advanced ESL learners and native speakers of English. Using the framework of the Government and Binding approach (Chomsky,1981, 1986), the study tests the predictions made by the evolved Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman, 2009), namely that the grammars of advanced L2 learners are unreliable(where reliability means converging to the L2 grammar), non-convergent to the L2 grammar, and characteristic of patches (where patches are extragrammatical principles independent of the normal syntactic processes). The participants of the study were tested on three tasks (timed grammaticality judgment task, a correction task, and a preference task). The findings of the study indicate that the difference between the morphosyntactic competence of the advanced ESL learners and that of native speakers is gradient rather than categorical.