Transfer at the initial state

The role of L1 transfer in second language acquisition has been the focus of exten-sive research for decades (Gass 1988; Eubank 1993/1994; Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996; Pienemann 1998, Pienemann et al. 2005a, Pienemann 2011) with transfer at the initial state being of particular interest. Competing approaches have been pro-posed to address this issue: Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA) (Schwartz andSprouse 1994, 1996), partial transfer/full access (Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1996) minimal transfer/full access (Platzack 1996) and the Developmentally Moder-ated Transfer Hypothesis (DMTH) (Pienemann 1998, Pienemann et al. 2005a) to name some of the key approaches. The debate on the initial state includes the issue of access to the L1 grammatical system.