Siegal’s study focuses primarily on individual differences. In the
detailed study of two speakers learning Japanese she describes the acquisition
of pragmatic and stylistic competence. The factors influencing their acquisition of these areas were knowledge of how Japanese women speak, the
overlap between politeness and “women’s language” and their view of
Japanese women and themselves while they were in Japan. Siegal found that
differences occurred because of the images the speakers wanted to present and
the contexts they interacted in. She suggests that the learning abroad experience
is important for learners of Japanese for elements which they do not
manage to pick up in the classroom. Similarly, as we have seen earlier,
Marriott’s quantitative study of the acquisition of Japanese by secondarylevel
Australian students shows that there was great individual variation in
the acquisition of politeness norms, and also, like Siegal’s and Regan’s speakers,
their performance deviates from the native speaker norm. It seems that,
as with other areas of competence, individual differences play an important
role in the acquisition of sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence.