Variations in Native Speaker Competence: Implications for First-Language Teaching.

Examined whether variations in adult native speaker performance arise from variations in working memory capacity or variations in procedural grammatical competence. Three groups of 18-year-old native speakers of English were tested on comprehension and recall of English complex noun phrase constructions. Results support the view that variations in adult native speaker performance arise from variations in procedural grammatical competence. (Author/VWL)