Is there a “natural sequence” in adult second language learning?

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The Bilingual Syntax Measure (Burt, Dulay, and Hernandez 1973) was administered to 73 adult learners of English as a second language in order to investigate accuracy of usage for eight English functors. It was found that there is a highly consistent order of relative difficulty in the use of the functors across different language backgrounds, indicating that learners are experiencing intra-language difficulties. Also, the adult results agreed with those obtained by Dulay and Burt (1973) for 5 to 8 year old children learning English as a second language, indicating that children and adults use common strategies and process linguistic data in fundamentally similar ways.