Susan Witt wrote:

>  We deprive ourselves of important
> insights when we get too narrow-minded in how we divide our investigations
> up, or put too many limitations on the kinds of things we look at.

I do not know the kinds of narrow-minded research that Susan Witt is
referring to.

All of the best research I know has native-speaker controls.  The
default assumption in the best SLA research is that second language
learners are like first language learners.  There is a lot of BAD SLA
research (see most of the stuff on contrastive rhetoric) which never
looks at what native speakers do.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University