Order of Acquisition

Order of acquisition is a concept in language acquisition describing the specific sequence in which language learners acquire the grammatical features of a language, based on the observation that children learning a first language tend to acquire its grammatical features in a fixed, universal order regardless of the language's particular structure. Research has largely confirmed this fixed-order pattern for first-language learners, but the order found among second-language learners is considerably less consistent, and it remains unclear why second-language learners' order of acquisition differs as much as it does; current research points to possible causes including interference from the learner's first language and more general cognitive interference from non-linguistic mental processes, with some grammatical items showing heavy influence from the learner's first language while others show little.