natural order hypothesis

In language ACQUISITION, the view that children follow essentially the same path in learning a language, and that when adults learn a foreign language they follow essentially the same path that they used when learning their mother-tongue. The motivation for the hypothesis came from observing the way many learners make similar errors (e.g. I going), regardless of their language background. It is suggested that a universal creative process is at work: in an early terminology, learners were said to follow a natural ‘internal syllabus’ (as opposed to the ‘external’ syllabus of the classroom). Because several of the errors closely resemble those made by children learning their first language, a parallel was proposed between the natural order of first-language ACQUISITION and the way people acquire a foreign language. However, with the accumulation of more data, several differences between first- and foreign-language acquisition have been observed.