Martha Young-Scholten (born in Hanover, New Hampshire) is a linguist specialising in the phonology and syntax of second language acquisition (SLA).
She has been a Prof of SLA at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom since September 2006.
[3] Young-Scholten is most notable within linguistics and SLA for developing the Minimal Trees Hypothesis with Anna Vainikka,[4] an "important theory,"[5] where 'tree' is a metaphor of syntax for the branching structure showing how words of a phrase or sentence co-relate.
Whereas many researchers lean towards a 'Full Transfer' view in which all the L1 grammar transfers[7] - i.e. the initial state of the L2 is the final state of the first - Young-Scholten and Vainikka have argued that only lexical categories (e.g. the noun phrase) are drawn from the L1, and that functional categories (e.g. the inflectional phrase that represents tense) do not; rather, the learner 'grows' new ones because they start their L2 acquisition with only a 'minimal' syntactic tree.
The different paths of acquisition that the three speakers took - acquiring German pronunciation deviant or not at all - led Young-Scholten to argue that the nature of the linguistic input they received was crucial to their performance.