Strategies, Language Transfer and the Simulation of the Second Language Learner's Mental Operations¹

The focus of this paper is on language transfer and a particular method of investigating it. Attempts to analyze the decision procedures underlying a learner's (or second language user's) attempts to structure utterances in a given target language in the light of some recent hypotheses about transfer should highlight the importance of the phenomenon and emphasise the dubiousness of a fairly standard view of transfer as a relatively simple mechanical procedure which the learner falls back on when more‘creative’ strategies fail.