Martha Young-Scholten


Professor Martha Young-Scholten is a linguist specialising in the phonology and syntax of second language acquisition.
Professor Young-Scholten was born in Hanover, New Hampshire and obtained a Masters in linguistics at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her PhD at the same institution concerned the structure of phonology in a second language. She has been a Prof of SLA at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom since September 2006.

The Minimal Trees Hypothesis

Professor Young-Scholten is most notable within linguistics and SLA for developing the Minimal Trees Hypothesis with Anna Vainikka, an "important theory," where 'tree' is a metaphor of syntax for the branching structure showing how words of a phrase or sentence co-relate. The hypothesis concerns what aspects of a language learner's first language is carried over into the grammar of their second language, in addition to mechanisms of universal grammar that allow new acquisition to take place.
Whereas many researchers lean towards a 'Full Transfer' view in which all the L1 grammar transfers - i.e. the initial state of the L2 is the final state of the first - Young-Scholten and Vainikka have argued that only lexical categories are drawn from the L1, and that functional categories do not; rather, the learner 'grows' new ones because they start their L2 acquisition with only a 'minimal' syntactic tree.
Several competing accounts for the role of transfer and universal grammar persist in SLA; the Minimal Trees Hypothesis remains particularly controversial, and has been strongly critiqued in syntactic research on both empirical and conceptual grounds: some researchers argue that linguistic behaviour does not follow the model, and others claim that it is theoretically misconceived. For example, the idea that a component of language could be absent from the initial stage, so that the system selectively extracts only one part of the L1, is unacceptable to those who favour 'Full Transfer' rather than 'Partial Transfer'.

Second language acquisition and formal linguistics

Professor Young-Scholten's primary research focus involves the phonology of second language acquisition, particularly in German and English as L2s. Data collected from three adolescent native speakers learning German in Germany has formed the basis of several papers. The different paths of acquisition that the three speakers took - acquiring German pronunciation deviant or not at all - led Professor Young-Scholten to argue that the nature of the linguistic input they received was crucial to their performance. For example, one learner whose exposure to German came largely through orthography did not acquire pronunciations that are unrepresented in written German, despite constantly hearing them.
Professor Young-Scholten is also involved in formal linguistics research on exceptional language acquisition, e.g. where learning is atypical due to problems such as dyslexia or specific language impairment; the comprehension approach to foreign language instruction; and the effect of orthography on the early stages of language learning.

Published Work