acquisition of article semantics by child and adult l1-english learners

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 15 Sep 2009 IP address: 137.110.4.125

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12 (3), 2009, 337–361 C© 2009 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1366728909990149 337

Acquisition of article semanticsby child and adult L2-Englishlearners∗

TANIA IONINUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–ChampaignMARIA LUISA ZUBIZARRETAUniversity of Southern CaliforniaVADIM PHILIPPOVOrel State University (Russia)

This paper examines article use in the L2-English of adult and child speakers of Russian, an article-less language. In earlierwork on articles in adult L2-English, Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004) proposed that speakers of article-less L1s fluctuatebetween dividing English articles on the basis of definiteness vs. specificity, as a result of direct access to semantic universals.The present paper examines whether similar fluctuation is present for child L2-English learners. Results of an elicitationstudy with L1-Russian child and adult learners of English show that both groups of learners exhibit sensitivity to definitenessas well as specificity. At the same time, it is found that the behavior of child L2-learners is more consistent with naturallanguage data than that of adult L2-learners. It is proposed that both children and adults have domain-specific knowledge ofsemantic universals, but that adults, unlike children, also use explicit strategies. This proposal is considered in light of theliterature on explicit vs. implicit knowledge.

A major question in the field of second language (L2)acquisition concerns whether children and adults acquire asecond language in the same way. Traditionally, the focusof much literature on critical periods in L2-acquisitionhas been on ultimate attainment: whether L2-learnerswho began acquiring the L2 in childhood (early learners)outperform those who did not begin the acquisition untiladulthood (late learners). The general finding has been thatearly L2-learners tend to outperform late L2-learners ontests of L2-grammar, although researchers disagree as towhether the source of this difference is biological, social,or input-driven, with evidence against critical periodscoming from the cases of near-native late L2-learners(see, among many others: Johnson and Newport, 1989,1991; Lee and Schachter, 1998; DeKeyser, 2000; and thepapers in Singleton and Lengyel, 1995, and in Birdsong,1999; see Herschensohn, 2007, for an overview).

More recently, L2-researchers have begun to examinethe PROCESSES at work in child vs. adult L2-acquisition(see, for instance, Lazarova-Nikovska, 2005; Unsworth,2005; Blom and Polisenska, 2006; Song and Schwartz,

* We would like to thank our undergraduate research assistants,Jomeline Balatayo, Erin Bardales, Anna Bokarius, Erin Kunkle andMatthew Wallace for their help with the data collection and analysisin the U.S., and students at Orel State University for their help withthe data collection in Russia. We are grateful to William Rutherfordfor allowing us the use of his cloze test for measuring L2-learners’proficiency. The research reported here is supported by NSF grant #BCS-0444088 (Principal Investigator: Marıa Luisa Zubizarreta) andby a University of Southern California undergraduate research grant.We are grateful to Silvina Montrul and to three anonymous reviewersfor comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Address for correspondence:Tania Ionin, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 South Mathews Ave.,Urbana, IL 61801, [email protected]

2009; and the discussion in Schwartz, 1992, 2003, 2004).The focus of these studies has been on whether childL2-learners and adult L2-learners exhibit similar patternsduring the course of acquisition. This issue has importantimplications for the discussion of whether L2-learnershave access to Universal Grammar (UG). L2-researchersworking in the generative framework generally agree thatchild L2-learners have access to UG, while there is muchmore debate concerning whether adults do as well. As laidout by Schwartz (1992, 2003, 2004), similar patterns ofdevelopment of child and adult L2-learners, with the L1held constant, provide evidence that adult L2-acquisition,like child L2-acquisition, is UG-constrained.

Child/adult parallels have typically been investigatedin the domains of syntax (or syntax/semantics interface)and morphology, such as object scrambling (Unsworth,2005) and inflectional morphology (Blom and Polisenska,2006). To our knowledge, there has been no work directlyexamining the acquisition of fine-grained semanticdistinctions by child vs. adult L2-learners. The main goalof the present paper is to add to the existing literatureon age effects in L2-acquisition by examining whetherchild and adult L2-learners exhibit similar patterns in theiracquisition of English articles.

Article choice is a particularly fruitful area for thisinvestigation, for several reasons. First, articles arenotorious for being quite difficult for L2-English learnersto master. Second, nearly all investigations of articlemeaning (as opposed to just article use/omission) in L2-acquisition that we are aware of have been done withadult learners (an important exception, discussed below,is Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008), so there is little or no

http://journals.cambridge.org


338 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov

information of how age might affect acquisition of articlesemantics. And finally, Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004) havespecifically argued that L2-English learners whose L1slack articles have direct, UG-mediated access to semanticuniversals underlying article use. This argument for UG-involvement would receive support if the same patternswere found with child as with adult L2-learners, on theassumption that child L2-learners have access to UG.

Building on the Ionin et al. (2004) study, we will com-pare article (mis)use among adult and child L2-Englishlearners from the same article-less L1 (Russian), and showthat there are both similarities and differences between thetwo age groups. The data reported here are part of a largerstudy comparing L2-English article use among adult andchild speakers of Russian and Spanish (see also Ionin,Zubizarreta and Bautista Maldonado, 2008).

On the one hand, we will show that the effects ofspecificity that Ionin et al. (2004) found in adult L2-English article use are also present for child L2-Englishlearners, supporting the view that learners’ patterns ofarticle (mis)use are UG-related. On the other hand, wewill show that the patterns exhibited by child L2-learnersare more consistent with natural language data than thoseexhibited by adult L2-learners. We will propose that whileboth children and adults have domain-specific linguisticknowledge of definiteness and specificity, adults alsomake use of explicit strategies, to a greater extent thanchildren. We will discuss the implications of these findingsfor the study of article use in child L1, child L2, and adultL2-acquisition, and for explicit and implicit knowledgemore generally.

This paper is organized as follows. In section 1, wediscuss previous findings with adult L2-English learners,and reconsider the original proposal of Ionin et al. (2004)in light of new cross-linguistic data. Section 2 provides anoverview of studies on the acquisition of English articlesby young children, and discusses the motivation fordoing child–adult comparisons. In section 3, we presentthe methods and results of the present study. Section 4discusses these findings and puts forth our proposal.Section 5 concludes the paper with a discussion of howL2-acquisition of articles compares to L1-acquisition ofarticles.

1. Adult L2-acquisition of English articles

The acquisition of English articles by adult L2-learnershas been much investigated (see, among many others,Huebner, 1983, 1985; Parrish, 1987; Thomas, 1989;Young, 1996; Murphy, 1997; Robertson, 2000; Trenkic,2000, 2007, 2008; Leung, 2001; Goad and White, 2004;Ionin et al., 2004, 2008). In this paper, we focus inparticular on recent work examining the patterns forarticle (mis)use in L2-English (as opposed to articleomission), and on the reasons behind these patterns.

1.1 L2-English articles and specificity

Many of the early studies on L2-English articles usedBickerton’s (1981) framework for classifying articleson the basis of the features of SPECIFIC REFERENCE andHEARER KNOWLEDGE. However, these features were notgiven precise semantic entries. Ionin (2003), adoptingexisting semantic analyses of definiteness and specificity(see Heim, 1991; Lyons, 1999), proposed that L2-English article choice should be viewed in terms ofSPECIFICITY AS SPEAKER INTENT TO REFER and DEFINITENESS

AS PRESUPPOSITION OF UNIQUENESS. Informal definitions ofthese semantic features (from Ionin et al., 2004) are givenin (1). The formal definition of definiteness adopted inthese studies is the Fregean analysis of definiteness, fromHeim (1991), while the formal definition of specificitywas developed by Ionin (2003, 2006), based on Fodor andSag’s (1982) concept of referentiality.

(1) If a Determiner Phrase (DP) of the form [D NP] is . . .

a. [+definite], then the speaker assumes that thehearer shares the presupposition of the existenceof a unique individual in the set denoted by NP.

b. [+specific], then the speaker intends to refer toa unique individual in the set denoted by theNP, and considers this individual to possess somenoteworthy property.

Ionin et al. (2004) proposed that definiteness andspecificity are semantic universals which underlie articlechoice cross-linguistically.1 English and many otherwestern European languages morphologically encodedefiniteness in their article systems, but not specificity.This is illustrated by the examples in (2), which show thatthe is used in contexts that are [+definite], as in (2a–b), anda in contexts that are [−definite], as in (2c–d), regardlessof whether the context is [+specific] or [−specific].

(2) a. [+definite, +specific] contextI want to talk to the winner of this race – she is agood friend of mine.

b. [+definite, −specific] contextI want to talk to the winner of this race – whoeverthat happens to be.

c. [−definite, +specific] contextProfessor Robertson is meeting with a studentfrom her class – my best friend Alice.

1 It is important to note that this proposal is concerned exclusivelywith articles in NON-GENERIC environments. Following Ionin et al.(2004), we do not examine article use in generic contexts (e.g., Lionsare dangerous animals, The lion is a dangerous animal, etc.). SeeKrifka et al. (1995) for an overview of the semantics of genericity,and Perez-Leroux, Munn, Schmitt and DeIrish (2004) on genericityin first language acquisition. For recent work on genericity in secondlanguage acquisition, see Slabakova (2006) and Ionin and Montrul(2009).



Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles 339

Table 1. Article grouping cross-linguistically: two-article languages (from Ionin et al.2004).

d. [−definite, −specific] contextProfessor Robertson is meeting with a studentfrom her class – I don’t know which one.

On the other hand, colloquial/spoken English doesencode specificity on indefinites, with a destressed formof the demonstrative this (see Prince, 1981; Maclaran,1982; Ionin, 2006). The use of this as a specificitymarker on indefinites is illustrated in (3). Note that thisis interchangeable with a in (3b), supporting the proposalthat it marks indefinites. At the same time, the distributionof indefinite this is more restricted than that of a: whileboth examples in (3) allow a, only (3b) allows this. Ionin(2006) analyzes such contrasts as follows: the speakerintends to refer to a particular stamp in (3b), where thestamp carries a noteworthy property of being worth afortune; however, the speaker does not intend to referto a particular stamp in (3a), where there is nothingnoteworthy about the stamp under discussion. As a result,the conditions on specificity, as given in (1b), are met in(3b) but not in (3a).

(3) a. He put on√

a/#this 31 cent stamp on the envelope,so he must want it to go airmail.

b. He put on√

a/√

this 31 cent stamp on the envelope,and only realized later that it was worth a fortunebecause it was unperforated.

(Maclaran, 1982, p. 88)

While indefinite this marks specificity on indefinitesonly, Ionin (2003, 2006) proposed that languages mayin principle encode the specificity distinction with bothdefinites and indefinites. Drawing on Samoan data fromMosel and Hovdhaugen (1992), Ionin (2003, 2006)suggested that the Samoan articles le and se encode thespecificity distinction regardless of definiteness: le is usedin both [+definite, +specific] and [−definite, +specific]contexts, while se is used in both [+definite, −specific] and[−definite, −specific] contexts. This difference betweenEnglish and Samoan is represented in Table 1.

In a series of studies, Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2003)and Ionin et al. (2004) formulated and tested predictionsof how the semantics of specificity is relevant for L2-acquisition of English articles by speakers whose L1slack articles. Ionin et al. proposed that in such cases, UGprovides the learners with the options for article semantics

Table 2. Patterns of English article use by speakers ofarticle-less L1s: predictions (from Ionin et al. 2004).

[+definite]: target the [−definite]: target a

[+specific] correct use of the overuse of the

[−specific] overuse of a correct use of a

that are available in natural language, including thoseoptions that are not instantiated in either the learners’ L1or their L2. Ionin et al. hypothesized that in the absence ofarticles in their L1, L2-English learners would have accessto both definiteness and specificity but would not, at leastinitially, know that English articles encode definitenessrather than specificity.

The predicted result would be FLUCTUATION betweenthese two semantic options: some of the time, learnerswould treat the as marking definiteness (and a indefinite-ness), and some of the time they would treat the as markingspecificity (and a non-specificity) – essentially, treatingEnglish as if it were Samoan. According to the predictionsof this Fluctuation Hypothesis (Ionin et al., 2004), learnersshould perform accurately on the categories of specificdefinites and non-specific indefinites, where the twooptions give the same results. When definiteness andspecificity are in conflict, on the other hand – on the cat-egories of specific indefinites and non-specific definites –learners are predicted to use the and a interchangeably.The four relevant categories are illustrated in (4)–(7),with the predictions for L2-article use stated.2 Thepredicted pattern of article use is schematized in Table 2.Crucially, the pattern in Table 2 is non-random: learnersare predicted to make errors in only two out of fourdifferent environments. (For more discussion of the roleof OPTIONALITY in L2-acquisition, see Sorace, 2000.)

(4) [+definite, +specific]: target thepredicted learner pattern: correct use of theLouise:Where’s your mother?

2 The items in (4)–(7) come from the test instrument used in the presentstudy, discussed later in this paper, and are modeled on the test itemsin Ionin et al. (2004). Like Ionin et al. (2004), we restrict our attentionto singular DPs. See Ionin et al. (2003) for evidence that a similarpattern was obtained for plural DPs.




Julie: She is meeting the principal of my brother’selementary school. He is a very nice man. He istalking to my mother about my brother’s grades.

(5) [+definite, −specific]: target thepredicted learner pattern: overuse of aRuby: It’s already 4 p.m. Why isn’t your little

brother home from school?Angela: He just called and told me that he got in

trouble! He is talking to the principal of hisschool! I don’t know who that is. I hope mybrother comes home soon.

(6) [−definite, +specific]: target apredicted learner pattern: overuse of theGrandfather comes for a visitGrandfather: Where is my little granddaughter Beth?

Is she home?Father: No . . . She is not going to be back till

late. She is having dinner with a girlfrom class – her name is Angie, andBeth really likes her.

(7) [−definite, −specific]: target apredicted learner pattern: correct use of aMother comes homeMother: How did Peter spend the day at his

grandmother’s?Father: He had a good time. He did his homework for

tomorrow. Then he went outside and playedwith a little girl – I don’t know who it was.Then he came back inside; and then I cameand took him home.

Ionin et al. (2004) tested the predictions in Table 2 withtwo groups of adult L2-English learners residing in theU.S.: L1-Russian speakers and L1-Korean speakers. Aspredicted, both definiteness and specificity had significanteffects on article (mis)use, and article errors were largelyconfined to the contexts of specific indefinites andnon-specific definites, as predicted. Since Russian andKorean both lack articles but are typologically verydifferent, Ionin et al. concluded that the results couldnot be attributed to L1-transfer. Rather, they argued,the patterns of article (mis)use supported the view thatL2-English learners have access to semantic universals,through Universal Grammar. Ionin et al.’s findings havesince been to some degree replicated with speakers ofother article-less L1s, such as Japanese (Hawkins et al.,2006) and Mandarin Chinese (Trenkic, 2008; but seesection 1.3 for discussion of Trenkic’s interpretation ofthe findings), further strengthening the conclusion thatspecificity effects with L2-learners from article-less L1sare not a result of L1-transfer. In contrast, L1-transfereffects have been found for L2-English learners comingfrom L1s with articles, such as Spanish (Ionin et al., 2008)and Greek (Hawkins et al., 2006).

1.2 New cross-linguistic evidence

Ionin et al.’s (2004) view of L2-English article use wasclosely tied to a particular view of article distributionin natural language: they argued that a language whichhas only two articles uses these two articles to encodeeither the definiteness distinction (as in English) orthe specificity distinction (as in Samoan).3 Furthermore,they proposed that a language like Samoan makes thespecificity distinction with both definites and indefinites,resulting in the pattern in Table 1. This proposal wassupported by Samoan data from Mosel and Hovdhaugen(1992).

However, as acknowledged at the time by Ionin et al.(2004), the available data from Samoan were quite limited,and at best suggestive, not conclusive. Ionin et al.’sproposal has since then led to two papers independentlyinvestigating the nature of specificity marking in Samoanin more detail. Fuli (2007) and Tryzna (2009) have bothshown convincingly that Samoan marks the specificitydistinction with indefinites but not with definites, contraryto what the Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992) data, cited byIonin et al. (2004), had suggested. This is illustrated in(8) and (9), from Fuli (2007). As shown in (8), specificindefinites are marked with le ((8a), where the speakerhas a particular movie in mind), whereas non-specificindefinites are marked with se ((8b), where the speakerhas no particular movie in mind).4

(8) a. [−definite, +specific]: leOu te fia matamata i le ata –I TAM want watch LD SP.SG movie‘ae ‘ua leai se avanoa.but TAM no NSP.SG space“I want to see a movie – but there is no space(or: it’s sold out).”

b. [−definite, −specific]: seOu te fia matamata i se ata –I TAM want watch LD NSP.SG movieae le’i mautinoa po’o le a le atabut not know Q:which SP.SG.ART movie.“I want to see a movie – but I don’t know whichmovie.”

3 Ionin (2006) further discusses what happens in a language which hasthree articles, such as colloquial English, with the, a, and referentialthis. Ionin (2006) shows that three-article languages use one articlewith all definites, another article with specific indefinites, and a thirdarticle (or no article) with non-specific indefinites. The discussion inthe present paper does not affect Ionin’s (2006) account of three-articlelanguages, only that of two-article languages.

4 The abbreviations used in the glosses of the Samoan examples in (8)and (9) are as follows (from Fuli 2007): ART = Article, LD = Locativedirectional particle, NSP = Non-specific, PRES = Presentative particle,SG = Singular, SP = Specific, Q = Question, TAM = Tense AspectMarker.




Table 3. Article grouping cross-linguistically: two-article languages (revised).

In contrast, definites are always marked with le, asshown in (9), which is based on a famous Englishexample from Donnellan (1966). Donnellan argued thatthe sentence Smith’s murderer is insane is ambiguousbetween two readings: a referential (specific) reading, onwhich the speaker intends to refer to a particular person(e.g., Jones), such that Jones is the murderer of Smith andJones is insane; and an attributive (non-specific) reading,on which the speaker states that whoever murdered Smithis insane. If Samoan made a specificity distinction withdefinites, we would expect le to be used on the specificreading of the murderer of Smith, and se on the non-specific reading. However, Fuli (2007) shows that this isnot the case: le is obligatorily used with definites, as in(9a), regardless of whether the speaker has a particularindividual in mind. Use of se in (9b), like use of a in amurderer of Smith, has the pragmatically odd implicationthat Smith had multiple murderers.

(9) a. [+definite]: leO le tagata na fasiotia SimitiPRES SP.SG.ART person TAM kill Smithe leaga le ulu.TAM bad SP.SG.ART head“The person who murdered Smith is insane.”

b. [+definite]: se is inappropriateO #se tagata na fasiotia SimitiPRES NSP.SG.ART person TAM kill Smithe leaga le ulu.TAM bad SP.SG.ART head“#A person who murdered Smith is insane.”

The correct representation of article distribution inEnglish vs. Samoan thus appears to be that in Table 3:the only context type in which English and Samoan differis [−definite, +specific]. Thus, Samoan joins a numberof other languages that morphologically mark specificitywith indefinites only, such as Modern Hebrew (Givon,1981, 2001) and Sissala (Blass, 1990) (see Lyons, 1999;Ionin, 2006, for more discussion).5 While languages such

5 It is furthermore not clear whether the specificity distinction madewith Samoan indefinites corresponds to SPECIFICITY AS SPEAKER INTENT

TO REFER as defined in (1b). Fuli (2007) argues that the distinctionbetween le and se corresponds more closely to the distinction between

as colloquial/spoken English, Modern Hebrew and Sissalause different morphemes to mark definites (the in English,ha in Hebrew, na in Sissala) and specific indefinites(indefinite this in English, xad in Hebrew, nε in Sissala),Samoan, as we saw above, marks definites and specificindefinites with the same morpheme, le.

Samoan is not alone in this: there is much cross-linguistic evidence outside the article system of languagesmarking definite and specific indefinite DPs in the sameway. One example is the Spanish dative prepositiona, which marks direct objects which are definite orspecific indefinite as well as animate (see Torrego, 1998;Aissen, 2003; Leonetti, 2004). Another is accusative-Casemarking in Turkish, which similarly applies to definitesand specific indefinites, but not to non-specific indefinites(see Enc, 1991; Kelepir, 2001). The issues surroundingboth the Spanish a and the Turkish accusative-Casemarking are quite complex (see the references cited abovefor detailed discussion), not least because it is not alwaysclear what type of specificity is under discussion: forinstance, Enc (1991) proposes that Turkish accusativeCase-marked specific indefinites are partitive, denotingmembers of a previously mentioned set; however, Kelepir(2001) shows that wide-scope indefinites which are notpartitive may also bear accusative Case-marking (see alsoKo, Ionin and Wexler, 2006, for the relevance of partitivityto L2-acquisition).

Another example, which is perhaps more straightfor-ward than the Spanish and Turkish cases, is that of theinitial vowel in the Bantu language of Luganda. Ferrari-Bridgers (2004) shows that the initial vowel is used withnominals that are referential, but not with those that arenon-referential. Referentiality here is used as a term thatunites definites and specific indefinites.

Thus, there is cross-linguistic evidence that languagesmay mark definites and specific indefinites in the same

wide and narrow scope (as in (8), where a movie takes wide vs. narrowscope with respect to want). Fuli also acknowledges that se is used withwide-scope indefinites when the identity of the referent is unimportant,but argues that this occurs only in particular registers, and not inregular speech. More investigation into this issue is required. Even ifSamoan does not use le for “specificity as speaker intent to refer”, thereis clear evidence that many other languages do: English indefinite this(as in (3)) is a case in point; another example is the Hebrew xad(Givon, 1981, 2001). See Ionin (2006) for more discussion.




way (see also Lyons, 1999, for more cross-linguistic data).This suggests that there is a core property that definites andspecific indefinites have in common, despite the semanticdifferences between these concepts. One candidate forsuch a core property is the semantic type of individual. Atleast on some analyses of definites (such as the Fregeananalysis adopted here), definites have the semantic typeof individual (see Heim, 1991): a definite determiner suchas the applies to a property (e.g., the property denoted bystudent) and returns an individual (e.g., the unique referentof the student).6 On the view of specificity discussedin this paper (see Ionin, 2006, for more discussion),specific DPs are similarly individual-denoting: a specificindefinite DP such as this one student (with this used as aspecific indefinite marker in colloquial English) denotesa specific individual that the speaker has in mind. Incontrast, indefinites which do not bear specificity marking,such as a student, are typically treated as quantificational(Heim, 1991) or cardinal (Diesing, 1992), but cruciallynot individual-denoting.

Thus, it is possible that languages such as Samoanand Luganda, which use the same marker for definitesand specific indefinites, are using that marker to encodeindividual-denoting (as opposed to quantificational) DPs.7

1.3 Implications for L2-acquisition

In light of the new data on Samoan, discussed above,we can no longer claim that L2-English learners whooveruse a with definites and overuse the with indefinitesare adopting the “Samoan” option. While overuse of thewith specific indefinites in L2-English is consistent withnatural language data, overuse of a with non-specificdefinites does not appear to have natural language parallels(see Lyons, 1999). Yet Ionin et al. (2004, 2008) found thatadult L2-English learners from article-less L1s made bothtypes of errors. At the same time, in Ionin et al. (2008), we

6 An anonymous reviewer notes that not all cases of DPs withdefinite articles cross-linguistically are individual-denoting, citing inparticular the existence of non-individual-denoting definites in certaincontexts in Romance languages (cf. Kupisch and Koops, 2006). Whileexamining different types of definites cross-linguistically is beyondthe scope of the present paper, we note that all definites included in ourtest instrument (as well as in that of Ionin et al., 2004), such as thosein (4) and (5), are compatible with the Fregean analysis of definites asindividual-denoting.

7 The issue is probably more complicated in Spanish and Turkish:Spanish a-marking and Turkish accusative marking have been shownto apply to certain quantifiers as well as to definites and specificindefinites (see the papers cited above for the complexity of theissues involved). This suggests that the marking does not (or at leastdoes not always) directly encode the semantic type of individual(since quantifier phrases do not denote individuals). Whatever thecase with quantifiers, the fact remains that Spanish and Turkish havemorphology that separates definites and specific indefinites from non-specific indefinites, with the semantic type of the DP quite possibly atthe heart of this separation.

found that specificity effects with indefinites were strongerthan specificity effects with definites, for L1-Russian L2-English learners, at both individual and group levels.

In Ionin et al. (2008), we had no explanation to offer forwhy some learners would make the specificity distinctionwith indefinites only. Now, in light of the new Samoandata, we have such an explanation: L2-English learnerswho make the specificity distinction only (or primarily)with indefinites are following natural language patterns, asindicated in Table 3. However, the question is now turnedon its head: why do other L2-English learners make thespecificity distinction with both definites and indefinites,given that this does not appear to be an option availableto natural language?

One possible answer would be to say that L2-Englishlearners’ errors have nothing to do with options availableto natural languages: learners’ patterns of article use aretraceable to explicit strategies, rather than to semanticuniversals. A proposal along these lines is put forthby Trenkic (2008), who questions Ionin et al.’s (2004)view that specificity can be morphologically encodedwith definites as well as indefinites in natural language;as we saw above, the new data available from Samoanlend support to Trenkic’s critique. Trenkic puts forthan alternative proposal, on which L2-English learners’article misuse is due not to the linguistic universal ofspecificity, but rather to an explicit strategy linking the anda to the presence vs. absence, respectively, of “explicitlystated knowledge”. We will discuss Trenkic’s proposalin detail in section 4.1, and provide a response to it insection 4.2. But first, before considering why adult L2-English learners use articles the way they do, we discussrelevant data from children acquiring English articles.

2. Acquisition of articles by children vs. adults

The study of how articles are acquired is certainlynot restricted to the study of adult learners. There hasbeen much work investigating articles in monolingualfirst language acquisition (Brown, 1973; Maratsos, 1976;Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Schaeffer and Matthewson, 2005,among many others), and, more recently, articles inbilingual first language acquisition (Serratrice, 2000;Kupisch, 2006) and child second language acquisition(Dirdal, 2005; Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008).

2.1 Articles in monolingual and bilingual languageacquisition

Interestingly, many studies of child acquisition ofEnglish report overuse of the in indefinite contexts – aphenomenon that, as discussed in the previous section,has also been attested in adult L2-acquisition. In the caseof child L1-acquisition, Brown (1973) reports overuseof the in naturalistic production data of very young




(2–3-year-old) children, while Warden (1976), Maratsos(1977) and Schaeffer and Matthewson (2005), amongothers, found overuse of the in elicitation experiments(as did Karmiloff-Smith, 1979, for overuse of definitearticles in child French). In these studies, overuse of thewas largely confined to contexts where the child could inprinciple have a specific referent in mind. For example,the two-year-olds in Schaeffer and Matthewson’s studywould say “Mickey Mouse drew the house” to a listenerwho had no previous familiarity with this house.

Studies of bilingual early language development havesimilarly found some overuse of the definite articlewith specific referents in naturalistic data. For instance,Kupisch (2006), studying an Italian–German bilingualchild (as well as a German–French child) longitudinally,found some cases of overuse of definite articles withspecific referents in Italian, but not in German (it shouldbe noted that the child on the whole used articles more inItalian than in German). Serratrice (2000) found potentialerrors of definite article overuse in an Italian–Englishbilingual child.8

When very young children make errors of articleuse, a standard explanation is that they lack relevantpragmatic knowledge: Maratsos (1976), for instance,argued following Piaget that young children are egocentricand ignore hearer knowledge. Schaeffer and Matthewson(2005) proposed, in a similar vein, that children havedifficulty separating speaker and hearer assumptions. Thesame explanation has been used for young bilingualchildren’s overuse of the (Serratrice, 2000; Kupisch,2006). On the other hand, some researchers (Matthewson,Bryant and Roeper, 2001; Wexler, 2003) have proposedlinguistic rather than psychological accounts of theoveruse by young children.

2.2 Articles in child L2-acquisition

A recent study that has examined articles among child L2-English learners in some detail is Zdorenko and Paradis(2008), which followed 17 L2-English children fromseveral different L1s over the period of two years (meanages 5;4 at the start, and 7;4 at the end of the study), usingan oral elicitation task with picture books.

Zdorenko and Paradis argued that all the noun phrasesproduced by the children in this task were [+specific]:the children were describing individuals and objectsvisually present in the pictures, so the speaker (the child)always had a specific referent in mind. The pictures were

8 It should be noted that studies of articles in naturalistic child speechtypically find lower percentages of the overuse than experimentalelicitation studies. However, given that in naturalistic speech, theexperimenter does not have control over the relevant contexts (e.g.,whether they are specific or non-specific), it is difficult to comparenaturalistic and experimental data directly.

not visible to the experimenter, and the children werereminded that the experimenter could not see the pictures.Therefore, use of the upon the first mention of the nounwas coded as infelicitous, as in the example in (10),while use of the upon second mention was coded asfelicitous. Errors of the overuse such as those in (10) wereconsidered to be errors with specific indefinites, since thechild was intending to refer to a particular elephant or ball(EXP = experimenter, CHI = child).

(10) Incorrect the in indefinite context∗EXP: how do you start?∗CHI: # mm # the elephant throw the ball.

(JHHN 5;11)(should be: an elephant and a ball)

(Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008, p. 238)

Interestingly, Zdorenko and Paradis found overuseof the with indefinites for children from both article-less L1s and L1s which have articles (only childrenfrom article-less L1s exhibited article omission). Aschildren’s exposure to English increased, rates of theoveruse with indefinites decreased, for both L1-groups,from 40–50% error rate in session 1 to 10–30% errorrate in session 5. Overuse of a with definites, in contrast,was practically non-existent, in both L1-groups, from theearliest sessions.

Zdorenko and Paradis interpreted their findings asproviding support for Ionin et al.’s (2004) FluctuationHypothesis, and as evidence that for L2-Englishchildren, fluctuation overrides transfer: even childrenfrom L1s which have articles were showing theoveruse with indefinites. In contrast, Ionin et al. (2008)found that transfer overrides fluctuation for adult L2-English learners: L1-Spanish L2-English learners wereuninfluenced by specificity in their article use.

Zdorenko and Paradis did not consider the possibilitythat the children’s errors of article misuse could stem fromage-related egocentricity: that the children focused on theindividual in the pictures and did not consider whether theexperimenter was equally familiar with the pictures. Thisexplanation can be fully ruled out only if age-matchednative English-speaking children performed the same taskand did not overuse the with indefinites. Unfortunately,Zdorenko and Paradis did not include such a controlgroup in their study. However, relevant evidence can befound in Warden (1976), who used a similar picture-basedelicitation test with L1-English children ages 3–9, as wellas native English adults. Overuse of the with first-mentionreferents was 54% for the 3-year-olds, down to 38%-39%for 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds, 18% for 9-year-olds, and0% for adults (Warden, 1976, p. 109, Experiment III).

Note that the L2-English children in Zdorenko andParadis’s (2008) study were between 5 and 7 years oldduring the first testing session, and that their rates of theoveruse are fairly similar to, perhaps just a little higher




than, rates of the overuse among the 5- and 7-year-oldnative English children in Warden (1976). Thus, it ispossible that the L2-English children as well as the nativeEnglish children were being egocentric, ignoring the stateof the listener’s knowledge. Alternatively, it is possiblethat both the L2-English children and the native Englishchildren were influenced by linguistic factors, optionallyusing the to mark specificity.

2.3 Motivation for the present study

To sum up, we have two unresolved issues when weconsider article (mis)use across different populations.First, the error of the overuse with indefinites, in thepresence of a specific referent, can in principle beexplained equally well by a psychological explanation(egocentricity, ignoring hearer assumptions) and alinguistic explanation (an association of the withspecificity). While the psychological explanation isapplicable to children (at least those below six or seven),it is not applicable to adults; the linguistic explanation, incontrast, is in principle applicable to all populations.

Second, we know that adult L2-English learnersoveruse a with non-specific definites, but that children donot. As discussed in section 1.3 above, this error appearsto lack parallels in natural language, and thus cannot beeasily accounted for via a linguistic explanation. Note thata overuse, unlike the overuse, also cannot be explainedthrough egocentricity. The absence of a overuse errorsin child (L1- and L2-)acquisition may indicate that thiserror in fact is never made by children. Alternatively,it could simply point to a difference in methodologybetween studies with children vs. adults: while adults weretested using highly controlled written elicitation tasks,studies with children rely on naturalistic or elicited oralproduction data, where [−specific] definite contexts maysimply be non-existent.

The goal of the present paper is to resolve theseissues, by examining article use in [+specific] indefiniteand [−specific] definite contexts by both child and adultL2-English learners, with the L1 held constant. Ourultimate aim is to tease apart three different explanationsof article misuse: egocentricity, an association of thewith specificity, and explicit strategies. Given previousfindings on L1-acquisition (Maratsos, 1976; Warden,1976; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979), we can say that theegocentricity explanation is applicable to children agefour or five, and possibly those as old as seven or eight,but definitely not those older than nine. In contrast,the specificity explanation is in principle applicable tolearners of all ages, depending on one’s view of UG-availability in L2-acquisition. And the explicit strategiesexplanation is applicable to adults and possibly olderchildren, i.e., learners with sufficient cognitive maturity

and metalinguistic ability to make conscious decisionsabout article use.

In light of these considerations, we see two distinctpossibilities for how article (mis)use might play out acrossdifferent populations. The first possibility is that there isno effect of specificity in developing grammar, contraryto what Ionin et al. (2004, 2008) proposed. Young L1-English and L2-English children (below age 8 or 9)overuse the as a result of egocentricity, while adult L2-English learners are governed by explicit, non-UG-basedstrategies, which lead to both overuse of the and overuseof a. Importantly, child L2-English learners past the ageof 9 should no longer be egocentric; at the same time,such older children may, like adult learners, make use ofexplicit strategies. These strategies, in turn, should lead toboth overuse of the with indefinites and overuse of a withdefinites.9

An alternative possibility is that specificity does playa role in developing grammar, and that marking thespecificity distinction with indefinites is an option madeavailable to L2-learners by UG. If we assume, alongwith many other L2-researchers (Schwartz, 2003, 2004;Unsworth, 2005, among others) that child L2-acquisitionis UG-constrained, then we expect child L2-Englishlearners to overuse the with indefinites but not to overusea with definites. Importantly, we expect to find such apattern in child L2-English learners past the age of nine,to whom the egocentricity explanation does not apply. Ifin fact we find that (non-egocentric) L2-English childrenoveruse the but not a, while adult L2-English learnersoveruse both articles, this would point to an importantdifference between the two populations, and suggest thatexplicit strategies play more of a role in adult than in childL2-acquisition.

Thus, in order to tease apart three different explanationsfor article misuse – egocentricity, specificity, and explicitstrategies – it is absolutely crucial to test child L2-Englishlearners, and to do so using the same methodology ashas been used with adult L2-English learners, namelythe written elicitation tasks used in Ionin et al. (2004,2008). We therefore focus on child L2-learners betweenthe ages of 10 and 12: old enough to complete a writtentest, old enough not to be influenced by egocentricity, yetstill young enough to be clearly child and not adolescentor adult learners.

We leave open at present the issue of whether child L1-learners (monolingual or bilingual) resemble (child and/oradult) L2-learners in their article errors. In section 5, wewill come back to this issue and discuss the implications

9 In principle, one could argue that adult and child L2-learners usedifferent strategies, and that adults’ strategies lead to both the anda misuse, whereas children’s strategies lead only to the misuse.However, this proposal is entirely unmotivated, and as such will notbe considered here.




that our findings have for theories of article (mis)use infirst language acquisition.

3. The study

Our study was designed to answer the following researchquestions:

(11) a. Do child and adult L2-English learners from anarticle-less L1 make the same error of the overusewith specific indefinites?

b. Do child and adult L2-English learners from thesame article-less L1 make the same error of aoveruse with non-specific definites?

We investigated these research questions by comparingchild and adult L1-Russian L2-English learners. Russianwas chosen as the L1 to test because it was one of the L1sof learners tested by Ionin et al. (2003, 2004).

3.1 Tasks

All of the participants, L2-learners as well as native-speaker controls, took a written elicitation test of Englisharticle use; additionally, all of the adult L2-learners took acloze test of L2-proficiency (the details of this test, whichwas created by William Rutherford, can be found in Ioninet al., 2008). Child participants did not take the cloze test,which was deemed to be too difficult for children.10

The elicitation test consisted of 60 short dialogues,each designed to elicit a particular target word. This taskwas modeled after elicitation tests used by Ionin et al.(2003, 2004), but with two important changes. First,while the previous studies’ tests gave the participants achoice of target words (e.g., the and a), the present taskcontained a blank in the target sentence; the participantswere instructed to fill in the blank with any word theyconsidered appropriate for the context (including a dashif no word was necessary). Second, unlike the previoustests, the present test included fillers targeting items otherthan articles.

Of particular relevance for us are 24 target itemswhich elicited articles in the four singular contextsgiven in Table 2, six items per category: [+definite,+specific], [+definite, −specific], [−definite, +specific]and [−definite, −specific]. The [+definite] and [−definite]items were designed to elicit the and a, respectively, fromnative English speakers. Examples of the four categoriescan be found in (4)–(7) above. In the actual test, the targetarticle was replaced by a blank.

10 Additionally, some of the participants completed an oral task, andthere were some differences in the type of oral task administered todifferent participants. However, these differences did not affect thewritten elicitation task reported here, which was identical for all theparticipants.

In addition to the 24 target items, the test contained12 other items testing article use in other contexts (notreported here) and 24 fillers. The fillers targeted functionwords other than articles, such as prepositions, pronouns,and auxiliaries; a few filler items also had a “dash” (i.e., noword) as a possible target response. Most filler items werecompatible with more than one response; performance ofadult native English speakers was taken as indicative indeciding which responses were appropriate.

Performance on fillers was used as a cut-off:participants had to give an appropriate response to atleast two thirds of the fillers (16 out of 24) in order tobe included in the final analysis. In this way, we couldbe certain that learners knew English well enough tounderstand the test dialogues; participants who performedpoorly on fillers were deemed to either have seriousdifficulties with the vocabulary and grammar of the test,or else to be unfamiliar and uncomfortable with thetest format (this was particularly an issue for the childparticipants, who were not as used as adults to takingstandardized tests). Either way, test difficulties wouldpotentially obscure the learners’ performance on the targetitems.

3.2 Participants

The L2-participants were adult and child Russian speakersliving in Orel, Russia, and learning English at school.We tested 26 adults, all but one of whom were universitystudents studying English in the classroom (the remaininglearner had previously studied English at university andnow used it at work), and 58 children between theages of 10 and 12, all of whom were studying Englishat school (see section 2.3 above on the importance ofusing this age range). Forty-three of the children attendedspecialized English schools, where English instructionbegan in second grade (age 7 or 8), and where Englishlessons took place every day of the week. Fifteen ofthe children attended regular schools, where English wastaught only starting in fourth grade (age 9 or 10), and onlytwo days a week.

As described in the previous section, participants hadto meet a cut-off in their performance on filler items inorder to be included in the final analysis. Twenty-one ofthe 26 adult L2-learners met this cut-off, but only 18 ofthe 58 children did, all of them from specialized schools.The test was clearly too difficult for all of the childrenfrom regular schools as well as many of the children fromspecialized schools; in addition to failing to meet the cut-off, these children performed quite randomly on the testitems. Of the 18 children who did meet the cut-off, 15were from the same specialized school, which may havehad more rigorous English instruction. Of the 18 children,16 were in fifth grade at the time of testing, and two werein sixth grade.




Table 4. Background of L2-learners included in the data analysis.

Adult L2-learners (N = 21) Child L2-learners (N = 18)

Mean

Standard

deviation Range Mean

Standard

deviation Range

Age at testing (in years) 20 1 18–22 11 0.58 10–12

Age of first exposure to English (in years) 8.9 2.4 5–14 5.8 1.3 3–8

Length of exposure to English (in years) 11 2.2 6–15 5.1 0.32 5–6

Cloze test score (maximum = 120) 21 9.5 6–44 n/a n/a n/a

Table 4 reports the background information on thoseadult and child L2-learners who met the cut-off and wereincluded in the data analysis. The two populations werefairly uniform in terms of their length of exposure toEnglish, with the adults having had more exposure, onaverage, than the children.

In terms of age of first exposure, we divided theparticipants into two groups: the “early exposure” groupwere those participants who began studying English atage 8 or earlier, in preschool or elementary school; the“late exposure” group were those participants who beganstudying English at age 9 or later, in middle school orhigh school. Schwartz (2004) argues that true child L2-learners are those whose exposure to the target languagebegan before age 8, and this age has been used as a cut-off in much subsequent literature on child L2-acquisition(e.g., Unsworth, 2005; Song and Schwartz, 2009).11 Giventhis classification, all 18 child L2-learners included inthe analysis were early-exposure learners (and hence truechild L2-learners). As for the adults, nine were early-exposure learners and 12 were late-exposure learners; wewill come back to this distinction within the adult groupin section 3.3.

The control groups consisted of 12 native Englishadults and 11 native English children (12 native Englishchildren were tested originally, but one failed to meet thecut-off). The mean age of the adult controls was 22.7(standard deviation 1.1, range 19–31), and the mean ageof the child controls was 10 (standard deviation 0.27,range 9–12). The native English adults and children werethus roughly matched with the L2-English adult and child

11 Schwartz (2004) does not make a distinction as to whether the firstexposure should be naturalistic (children immersed in the targetlanguage) or classroom-based (children studying a foreign languagein their home country). In fact, a recent study by Song and Schwartz(2009) looks at L1-English children acquiring L2-Korean in theclassroom, in an English-speaking environment. Thus, our testingof child L2-learners in a classroom setting is quite in line with otherresearch in L2-acquisition. We would have liked to also test a group ofL1-Russian child learners of English in the U.S., but unfortunately,due to the greatly diminished immigration from Russia in recentyears, we were unable to find enough such subjects for a meaningfulanalysis.

groups in terms of age (four additional adult native Englishparticipants were excluded from analysis due to beingmuch older, in their 40s and 50s). Of the 11 native Englishchildren, three were in fourth grade, six were in fifth grade,and two were in sixth grade, at the time of the testing.

3.3 Group results

Throughout this section, we report the results of nativeEnglish speakers (adults + children) separately from theresults of the L2-English learners (adults + children).We do not combine the two groups because our researchquestion is not concerned with differences between nativespeakers and L2-English speakers (which are expected,given the nature of L2-acquisition). Our research question,rather, is concerned with the patterns within the L2-English group, and with child–adult differences inparticular. For comparison, we report the results of thenative English group.

The figures in this section report the means andstandard deviations of the and a use for each test category.We also report separate statistical analyses for use ofthe vs. use of a, following the practice in Ionin et al.(2004). Our rationale for this is as follows. Each test itemcould potentially receive one of four responses: the, a,“no article”, or “other” (such as some, a demonstrative,a possessive pronoun, etc.). Given that our predictionsconcern both the use and misuse, and a use and misuse,we need to examine the effects that definiteness andspecificity had on both article types.

Native English speakersFigures 1 and 2 compare the and a uses, respectively,among adult and child native English speakers. Asthe figures show, the adults were near ceiling in theirperformance. The children were less accurate, but mostof their errors were constrained to the category of non-specific indefinites, and even there the error rate wasonly 14%. A repeated-measures ANOVA was run on thegroup of native English speakers, with definiteness andspecificity as the within-subjects variable, and age group(adult vs. child) as the between-subjects variable. Separate




childadult

6.00

5.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00

-def, -spec

-def, +spec

+def, -spec

+def, +spec

Error bars: +/- 1.00 SD

Figure 1. Mean use of the by category and age group (native English speakers).

childadult

6.00

5.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00

-def, -spec

-def, +spec

+def, -spec

+def, +spec


Figure 2. Mean use of a by category and age group (native English speakers).




Table 5. Results of repeated-measures ANOVAs for native English speakers(N = 23: 12 adults and 11 children).

Factor Use of the Use of a

Definiteness F(1,21) = 1152∗∗∗ F(1,21) = 1124∗∗∗

Definiteness × age group F(1,21) = 8.53∗∗ F(1,21) = 6.71∗

Specificity F(1,21) = 1.27 F(1,21) = 0.323

Specificity × age group F(1,21) = 1.27 F(1,21) = 2.10

Definiteness × specificity F(1,21) = 3.16 F(1,21) = 0.323

Definiteness × specificity × age group F(1,21) = 3.16 F(1,21) = 2.10

Age group F(1,21) = 0.33 F(1,21) = 3.35

∗∗∗p < .001; ∗∗p < .01; ∗p < .05

ANOVAs were conducted on use of the vs. use of a. Theresults are given in Table 5.

As Table 5 shows, definiteness had a highly significanteffect on both the and a suppliance, as expected, andspecificity had no effect. The only significant interactionwas between definiteness and age group. This was due tothe adults making a stronger distinction between definitesand indefinites than did the children – the adults weregenerally more accurate in their article use. Age groupdid not otherwise have any significant effect.

L2-English learners: overall accuracyBefore proceeding to a discussion of how definitenessand specificity influenced L2-English children and adults,we first consider the extent to which these two groupsare comparable in their overall article use. On the onehand, there is much literature suggesting that childrenoutperform adults when other factors (such as lengthof exposure) are held constant. On the other hand, thechildren in our study had on average less exposure toEnglish than did adults; given that both children and adultsare studying English in a classroom EFL context, it is quitepossible that the adults, with more classroom exposurethan the children, would perform better.

In order to assess these issues, we first computed overallaccuracy scores for both groups, an “absolute accuracy”score and a “relative accuracy” score, using the formulasin (12). As an illustration, consider adult learner A2, whosupplied an article in 20 of the 24 items (the other 4 itemsreceived a “no article” or “other” response), and whowas furthermore correct on 14 of those 20 articles (usingthe with definites and a with indefinites), but exhibitedarticle misuse on the other 6. The learner’s absoluteaccuracy score would be 14/24 = 58%, whereas thislearner’s relative accuracy score would be 14/20 = 70%.

(12) a. absolute accuracy score = # of learner’s correctarticle uses (the with definites and a withindefinites) / total number of test items (N = 24)

b. relative accuracy score = # of learner’s correctarticle uses (the with definites and a withindefinites) / total number of items in which thelearner supplied an article

The mean accuracy scores for the adult group were72% absolute accuracy and 78% relative accuracy; for thechild group, the scores were 76% absolute accuracy and81% relative accuracy. The children and adults did notdiffer from each other significantly on either accuracyscore (t(1,37) = .95, p = .38 and t(1,37) = .83, p = .43,respectively; equal variances not assumed). Thus, eventhough the adults had on average more exposure toEnglish, they did not outperform the children.

In order to find out how overall accuracy was influencedby individual differences between subjects, we computedbivariate correlations between the two accuracy scoresand the following factors: age at the time of testing; age offirst exposure to English (as self-reported by the subjects);length of exposure to English (calculated by subtractingage of first exposure from age at testing); and the clozetest proficiency score, for adult subjects only. The onlyvariable among these that correlated significantly witharticle accuracy was age of first exposure to English,which had a significant inverse correlation both withthe absolute accuracy score (r = −.43, p < .01) and therelative accuracy score (r = −.32, p < .05). Thus, asage of exposure to English increased, overall accuracydecreased, consistent with what we know about theadvantages of early exposure. Importantly, age at the timeof testing did not correlate at all with either accuracy score(r = −.10, p = .55 and r =−.06, p = .71, respectively).This shows that being a child or an adult at the timeof the study did not significantly affect the learner’saccuracy.

Given that the two groups were not significantlydifferent from one another in overall accuracy, we cannow examine whether the PATTERNS exhibited by thesetwo groups are also similar.




Table 6. Results of repeated-measures ANOVAs for L2-English learners(N = 39: 21 adults and 18 children).

Factor Use of the Use of a

Definiteness F(1,37) = 230∗∗∗ F(1,37) = 233∗∗∗

Definiteness × age group F(1,37) = 0.24 F(1,37) = 1.01

Specificity F(1,37) = 17.9∗∗∗ F(1,37) = 33.94∗∗∗

Specificity × age group F(1,37) = 0.28 F(1,37) = 3.17

Definiteness × specificity F(1,37) = 9.88∗∗ F(1,37) = 3.87†

Definiteness × specificity × age group F(1,37) = 1.28 F(1,37) = 4.60∗

Age group F(1,37) = 1.20 F(1,37) = 0.38

∗∗∗p < .001; ∗∗p < .01; ∗p < .05; †p = .057 (marginal)

childadult

6.00

5.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00

-def, -spec

-def, +spec

+def, -spec

+def, +spec


Figure 3. Mean use of the by category and age group (L2-English learners).

L2-English learners: effects of definitenessand specificityFigures 3 and 4 compare the child and adult L2-Englishlearners on use of the vs. use of a, respectively. As thelarge standard deviations show, there was much variationamong individual L2-learners – a point that we will comeback to in section 3.4.

A repeated-measures ANOVA was run on the L2-English group, with definiteness and specificity as within-

subjects variables, and age group (adult vs. child) asthe between-subjects variable. Separate ANOVAs wereconducted on use of the vs. use of a. The results are givenin Table 6.

As Table 6 shows, both definiteness and specificityhad highly significant effects, regardless of whether theor a was measured. At the same time, the interactionbetween definiteness and specificity was significant whenuse of the was measured and marginal when use of a was




childadult

6.00

5.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00

-def, -spec

-def, +spec

+def, -spec

+def, +spec


Figure 4. Mean use of a by category and age group (L2-English learners).

measured. These interactions were due to the fact thatthe specificity distinction was stronger with indefinitesthan with definites: specific and non-specific indefinitesdiffered more from each other with respect to the overuse(and hence correct a use) than specific and non-specificdefinites differed from each other with respect to a overuse(and hence correct the use). Furthermore, when use of awas measured, there was a significant interaction betweendefiniteness, specificity, and age group. This was due tothe fact that the “definiteness by specificity” interactionexisted for the child group only: adults made the samespecificity distinction for definites and indefinites on useof a, while children made a much greater distinction withindefinites than with definites. To put it more simply,children exhibited much overuse of the with specificindefinites, but little in the way of a overuse with non-specific definites. Adults, by contrast, made both kinds oferrors.

3.4 Individual results

In order to determine how the specificity distinctionplayed out with definites and indefinites for individualparticipants, we classified the adult and child L2-learnersinto different patterns.

The classification procedure was as follows. Weconsidered only errors, overuse of a with definites andoveruse of the with indefinites, since these are trueindications of article misuse. Given the fairly low rate ofarticle omission or use of “other” responses, correct useof the and a with definites and indefinites, respectively,is nearly a mirror image of article misuse for mostparticipants. We then computed the number of specificity-related errors for both indefinites and definites, using theformulas in (13).

(13) a. Specificity distinction with indefinites# of specificity-related errors on indefinites =# of the uses with specific indefinites – # of theuses with non-specific indefinites

b. Specificity distinction with definites# of specificity-related errors on definites =# of a uses with non-specific definites – # of auses with specific definites

Next, we classified learners into five patterns based onhow their specificity distinction with definites comparedto that with indefinites. These patterns are described in(14). Three of the patterns were for learners who exhibitedfluctuation on at least one category (see (14a)) and two




of the patterns were for learners who did not exhibitfluctuation (see (14b)).12

(14) a. Fluctuation patterns: at least 3 errors of articlemisuse, and at least 2 of them related tospecificity13

PATTERN 1: SPECIFICITY DISTINCTION WITH

DEFINITES ONLY/MOSTLY

at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, andspecificity distinction with definites exceedsspecificity distinction with indefinites by 2 ormore tokens (2 vs. 0, 3 vs. 1, etc.)PATTERN 2: SPECIFICITY DISTINCTION WITH

INDEFINITES ONLY/MOSTLY

at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, andspecificity distinction with indefinites exceedsspecificity distinction with definites by 2 or moretokens (2 vs. 0, 3 vs. 1, etc.)PATTERN 3: FLUCTUATION

at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, andspecificity distinction exists with both definitesand indefinites, and the two distinctions are eitherequal (1 vs. 1, 2 vs. 2, etc.) or differ by 1 tokenonly (2 vs. 1, 3 vs. 2, etc.)

12 Three participants were not included in any of these five patterns dueto exhibiting completely unexpected article use: an adult participantwho overused the with non-specific indefinites more than withspecific indefinites (two-token difference); a child participant whooverused a with specific definites more than with non-specificdefinites (two-token difference); and an adult participant whooverused a with more than half (four out of six) of specific definites(no other participant made more than three errors on the category ofspecific definites, or on the category of non-specific indefinites, andthe majority of participants made at most one or two errors in thesecategories – i.e., categories where no article misuse is predicted).These three participants’ behavior is entirely unpredicted and doesnot fall into any possible pattern. Note that there were only three suchparticipants out of 39 participants total, so the results are probablynoise, due to poor understanding of the test.

13 We acknowledge that any cut-off is necessarily arbitrary, and providesome motivation for our chosen cut-off below. Given the existenceof 6 tokens in each category, the total possible number of specificity-related errors is 12 (maximum 6 specificity-related errors withindefinites, maximum 6 specificity-related errors with definites). Fewparticipants made more than 3 or 4 specificity-related errors. We set2 specificity-related errors as a cut-off because 2 errors are less likelythan 1 error to be due to noise; on the other hand, setting the cut-offabove 2 would have resulted in too many participants being classifiedas target-like.

We note that Pattern 1 includes some learners who made aspecificity distinction with definites (2 or more) as well as a smallreverse (−1) distinction with indefinites – i.e., a greater overuseof the with non-specific than with specific indefinites. Similarly,Pattern 2 includes some learners who made a specificity distinctionwith indefinites (2 or more) and a small reverse (−1) distinctionwith definites. Since these “reverse specificity” distinctions had themagnitude of only 1 token, they are considered noise. Participantswho made a reverse distinction which had the magnitude of 2 or moretokens were not included in any pattern, as described in the previousfootnote.

b. Non-fluctuation patterns: fewer than 2specificity-related errorsPATTERN 4: NO FLUCTUATION

at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, but nomore than 1 of them is related to specificity – i.e.,errors are distributed across different categoriesPATTERN 5: TARGET-LIKE

2 or fewer errors of article misuse, regardless ofwhere they occur

Figure 5 shows the number of subjects falling into eachof the five patterns in the adult vs. child L2-groups. Figure5 points to a striking difference between children andadults: the single most frequent pattern for adults is Pattern3 – fluctuation with both definites and indefinites – whilethe single most frequent pattern for children is Pattern 2 –fluctuation with indefinites only. Additionally, a greaterproportion of children than of adults is target-like(Pattern 5) or otherwise uninfluenced by specificity(Pattern 4), although members of both groups arerepresented in both patterns. Pattern 1 (fluctuation withdefinites only) is the least frequent pattern in the data, andit is exhibited primarily by adults.

Finally, we consider the role that age of first exposurehas on the patterns of article (mis)use. We already saw, insection 3.3, that earlier age of exposure (for both childrenand adults) correlates significantly with performance. Wenext ask whether the patterns of individual article (mis)usewere different for the nine adult L2-learners with earlyfirst exposure (age 8 or younger) vs. the 12 adults withlate first exposure (age 9 or older). (Recall that all ofthe children had early first exposure.) We found thatthe single adult subject who patterned with the children,in making the specificity distinction with indefinitesonly (Pattern 2), had early exposure, like the children.However, three other early-exposure adults patterned withfive of the late-exposure adults in making the specificitydistinction across the board (Pattern 3), while one early-exposure adult patterned with three late-exposure adultsin showing fluctuation with definites only (Pattern 1). The“no fluctuation” patterns (4 and 5) were exhibited by fourearly-exposure and two late-exposure adults. In light ofthese findings, we cannot reach any definitive conclusionabout the role of age of exposure on performance.

4. Discussion

In this study, we found the following patterns. First, we sawthat child L1-Russian L2-English learners, like adult L1-Russian L2-English learners, are influenced by specificityin their patterns of article (mis)use. At the same time,however, we saw that adult L2-learners exhibit specificityeffects with both definites and indefinites, whereas childL2-learners exhibit specificity effects with indefinites to amuch greater degree than with definites. At the individual




5. target-like4. nofluctuation

3. fluctuation2. specificitydistinction w/

indefinites only

1.specificitydistinction w/definites only

8

6

4

2

0

child

adulttype

Figure 5. Number of L2-learners in individual patterns.

level, most adult subject who were non-targetlike made thespecificity distinction with both definites and indefinites,and a few did so with definites only, while most of thechildren who were non-target-like made the specificitydistinction with indefinites only (see Figure 5).

As discussed in section 1.2, many natural languagesmake the specificity distinction with indefinites, whereas(in light of new data from Samoan) no language appearsto make a specificity distinction with definites. The L2-English children are thus within the bounds of what ispossible in natural language: they appear to (optionally)use the to mark the semantic type of individual, and henceto mark both definites and specific indefinites. Note thatthe egocentricity explanation, discussed in section 2.2,cannot apply to the L2-English children in our study,who are between 10 and 12 years of age. Importantly, thecontrol group of age-matched native English children didnot exhibit any effects of specificity. Since egocentricityis related to cognitive maturity, and hence to age, ifegocentricity were still influencing article use in 10-year-old children, we would expect it to influence both nativeEnglish and L2-English children. The clear differencesbetween the two groups provide evidence in favor of alinguistic explanation of L2-English children’s data.

The adult L2-English learners, on the other hand,follow a different pattern, making errors of a overuse with

definites as well as the overuse with indefinites – the samepattern that has been found for adult L2-English learnersin earlier studies (Ionin et al., 2004, 2008; Trenkic, 2008).Since this pattern is not consistent with natural language,what is it due to? In the rest of this section, we addressthis question.

4.1 Trenkic (2008): strategies underlying L2-Englisharticle use

As discussed in section 1.3, Trenkic (2008) proposedthat adult L2-English learners’ errors of the overuseand a overuse are not related to the semanticuniversal of specificity, but rather arise from an explicitstrategy. Trenkic (2008) takes issue with Ionin et al.’soperationalization of specificity as “explicitly statedknowledge”: in items designed as [+specific], like thosein (4) and (6) above, there is an explicit statement ofthe speaker’s familiarity with the referent, while in itemsdesigned as [−specific], like those in (5) and (7) above,such familiarity is explicitly denied. According to Trenkic,the fact that L2-English article use is influenced byEXPLICITLY STATED KNOWLEDGE (ESK) does not show thatthe semantic universal of specificity is in fact at work,since specificity as “speaker intent to refer” is not thesame concept as ESK.




In light of this critique, Trenkic provides analternative explanation, namely that L2-English learnersare misanalyzing the and a as adjectives, and assigning tothem the meanings of “identifiable” and “unidentifiable”,respectively. When the discourse contains a statement ofESK, as in (4) and (6), learners consider the referent tobe identifiable, and use the. When the discourse does notcontain a statement of ESK, as in (5) and (7), learnersconsider the referent to be unidentifiable, and use a. Thus,the pattern of article misuse found by Ionin et al. isaccounted for without an appeal to semantic universals.

In order to further support this proposal, Trenkicreplicated the study of Ionin et al. (2004) with L1-Mandarin learners of English in the UK, adding two newcategories to the categories in (4)–(7). These categories,exemplified in (15) and (16), are argued to be [+specific],because the speaker is intending to refer to a particularindividual, but [−ESK], because the speaker is denyingknowledge of this individual.

(15) [−definite] [+specific, −ESK]: The speaker has aspecific referent in mind, but she explicitly deniesthat she knows the identity of the person being talkedabout.Office gossipGina: . . . and what about the others?Mary: Well, Dave is single, Paul is happily married,

and Peter . . . he is engaged to a merchantbanker, but none of us knows who she is,or what she’s like.

(16) [+definite], [+specific, −ESK]: The speaker has aspecific referent in mind, but she explicitly deniesthat she knows the identity of the person being talkedabout.Paul: Will Bob join us for lunch?Sheila: No, he’s very busy. He is meeting with the

director of his company. I don’t know whothat person is, but he will decide whetherBob gets his promotion or not.

Trenkic found that (15) and (16) were treated bylearners just like the [−specific] categories in (5) and(7), and not like the [+specific] categories in (4) and (6).Trenkic concluded that L2-English learners are influencedby ESK rather than by specificity, and that the source ofarticle errors is a misanalysis of determiners as adjectives,rather than access to semantic universals.

4.2 A response to Trenkic: against articles asadjectives

Trenkic is quite right to point out that specificity hasbeen operationalized as ESK in our studies. However,we disagree with Trenkic’s proposal that articles inL2-English are misanalyzed as adjectives. Below, we

discuss three reasons for our disagreement: (i) evidencethat operationalization of specificity as ESK is in factwarranted by natural language data; (ii) evidence that L2-English learners pay attention to specificity, rather thanESK, in deciding which articles to use; and (iii) lack ofsupport for Trenkic’s proposal that articles are adjectivalin L2-English.

Specificity as ESK: evidence from naturallanguage dataWe argue, contra Trenkic (2008), that the operational-ization of specificity as ESK is supported by specificitymarking with indefinites in natural language. Ionin (2003,2006) showed that native English speakers find use of thespecific indefinite marker this more felicitous preciselyin those contexts where a statement of ESK providesan indication that the speaker considers the referentNOTEWORTHY. Furthermore, Ionin (2006) showed thatnative English speakers’ judgments of the acceptabilityof indefinite this coincides with L2-English learners’overuse of the with indefinites. In a small pilot study,native English speakers were provided with the indefinitecontexts from an elicitation test administered to L2-English learners (the test whose results are reported inIonin et al., 2004), and asked to rate the acceptabilityof specific indefinite this in each context. As reported inIonin (2006), native English speakers rated indefinite thissignificantly higher in those indefinite contexts set up as[+specific] than as those set up as [−specific]. This findingsuggests that the operationalization of specificity as ESKinfluenced not just L2-English learners’ judgments, butthose of the native English speakers as well.

Evidence from L2-English learners’ self-reportsThere is also independent evidence that L2-Englishlearners are influenced by specificity rather than ESKin their article use. This evidence comes from Yangand Ionin (2009), who partially replicated Trenkic’s(2008) study with adult L1-Mandarin speakers learningEnglish in China. Like Trenkic, Yang and Ionin comparedperformance on contexts such as (15) and (16) to contextssuch as (4)–(7), and like Trenkic, they found that use ofthe was greater in [+ESK] than in [−ESK] contexts. Tosupplement these findings, Yang and Ionin also asked theirsubjects to provide the reason for their response, in writtenform.14 They then classified these reasons into severaldifferent types, including “uniqueness”, “specificity”, and

14 The method was partially based on that of Butler (2002), who alsoelicited L2-English learners’ reasons for article (mis)use. However,while Butler conducted an interview asking for the learners’ reasonsAFTER the learners had completed the article elicitation test, Yangand Ionin asked learners to supply the reasons DURING the test. Thus,Yang and Ionin’s study provides more direct information about whatlearners think as they are taking a test of articles.




“ESK”. An example of a subject’s response falling intothe “specificity” category was “Because the speaker hasa particular reference [sic] in mind”, while an exampleof an “ESK” response was “Because the speaker saidthat he doesn’t know the person”. Specificity was by farthe most frequent reason given by the L2-learners fortheir article choice, accounting for 69% of the overallresponses, while ESK was given as a reason only 9% ofthe time (Yang and Ionin, 2009). Even when the contextwas set up as [−definite, +specific, −ESK], L2-learnersoverused the (nearly as often as in the [+ESK] variant)and explained their overuse by the presence of a particularreferent in 73% of the instances; and conversely, when thecontext was set up as [+definite, +specific, −ESK], L2-learners overused a and explained this by the absence of aparticular referent in 62% of the instances. The statementor denial of ESK did not appear to be the determiningfactor in learners’ article misuse, contrary to Trenkic’sclaims.

Lack of evidence for the adjectival nature of articlesFinally, a problem with Trenkic’s proposal is thatit rests on the assumption that L2-English learnersfrom article-less L1s misanalyze English determiners asadjectives. Given the typological variety of languages(Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Japanese) whosespeakers have been found to exhibit specificity effectsin L2-English, it is unlikely that every single one ofthese languages treats determiners as adjectival. Trenkic(2004, 2007), citing Corver (1992), Zlatic (1997), andBoskovic (2005), among others, makes a persuasivecase for the adjectival nature of Serbian determiners.A case can also be made for the adjectival natureof determiners in Russian, another Slavic language, inwhich determiners share morphological and syntacticproperties with adjectives (but see Pereltsvaig, 2007, forarguments that the Determiner functional category existsin Russian). Importantly, however, Trenkic provides noevidence that determiners in Mandarin Chinese – theL1 under investigation in her 2008 paper – or, for thatmatter, Korean or Japanese, are adjectival. She simplyassumes that this is the case, stating (p. 12) that “It goeswithout saying that Mandarin, Russian and Korean wouldall have ways of signalling the identifiability of referents indiscourse (all languages do), and that they would differ inhow they achieve this. But all that matters for the presentdiscussion is that none of them has articles . . . For our ownproposal, it means that they all are assumed not to havethe syntactic category determiner in their L1.”

We believe that this assumption is quite controversial:first of all, it has not been convincingly shown that allarticle-less L1s have adjectival determiners; second, thereis little or no direct evidence that speakers of article-lessL1s really do consider the and a to be adjectives. Theonly evidence comes from Trenkic (2007), who found

that L1-Serbian L2-English learners omitted articles morewith adjectivally modified nouns than with unmodifiednouns (e.g., the same learner might correctly say theforest but also say dark forest without an article). Trenkic(2007) proposed that L2-learners have limited attentionalresources, and therefore produce only one adjective ata time: treating articles as adjectives, they drop themwhen a more informative adjective (such as dark) isrequired by the context. Even assuming that the empiricalfindings of article drop can be generalized to other L1-groups, such as Russian and Mandarin Chinese, it is farfrom clear that they provide support for articles beingadjectival in nature. Trenkic’s explanation in terms ofattentional resources works perfectly well without thefurther stipulation that learners treat articles as adjectival:when learners’ attentional resources are taken up with theretrieval of a noun (forest) and an adjective (dark), learnersfail to retrieve functional elements, such as articles.Even if they have correctly analyzed articles as beingdeterminers – rather than adjectives – limited attentionalresources could still cause article drop.

4.3 Semantic universals and strategies in adultL2-English

The findings with adult and child L2-English learnerspresent a conundrum. On the one hand, overuse of the withindefinites in L2-English is exhibited by both childrenand adults, is tied to the semantic universal of specificity,and finds parallels in natural language (notably, in nativespeakers’ judgments of specific indefinite this). On theother hand, overuse of a with definites is exhibited by adultlearners only, and finds no natural language parallels.

One way to solve this conundrum would be to saythat adult L2-English learners employ explicit strategiesin their article use, and are not influenced by thesemantic universals of definiteness and specificity. ChildL2-English learners, on the other hand, do accesssemantic universals, making the specificity distinctionwith indefinites only, much as natural languages do.

This explanation faces a number of difficulties,however. First of all, the same phenomenon – overuse ofthe with specific indefinites, in the same contexts – is givendifferent explanations depending on whether it occursamong children or among adults. Second, this explanationfails to capture the similarities between overuse of the inadult L2-English and specificity marking with indefinitescross-linguistically. And finally, it leaves open the questionof why learners should adopt the particular strategy thatthey do; as discussed in the previous section, the particularstrategy-based explanation proposed by Trenkic (2008) isproblematic, in that it makes unwarranted assumptionsabout learners’ misanalysis of determiners as adjectives.

We put forth an alternative proposal, which combinesdomain-specific linguistic knowledge and explicit




strategies. Access to semantic universals, namely definite-ness and specificity, constitutes domain-specific linguisticknowledge, which we argue is available to both child andadult L2-learners. At the same time, however, learners mayformulate explicit strategies for how articles are used; weargue that adult learners are more likely to do so than childlearners.

When child L2-learners respond to the elicitation taskin our study, they use their domain-specific linguisticknowledge directly, attending both to definiteness and tospecificity in the discourse context: they pay attentionboth to whether uniqueness has been established (use thewith definites) and to whether the speaker has a specificreferent in mind (use the with specific indefinites). Incontrast, adult L2-learners formulate an explicit strategybased on specificity, along the lines of “use the when thespeaker has a particular referent in mind, use a when thespeaker does not have a particular referent in mind” – i.e.,precisely the strategy verbalized by the learners in Yangand Ionin’s (2009) study.

Adult learners, then, use contextual cues, such asthe presence or absence of ESK, to deduce whether thespeaker has a particular referent in mind: for instance, in(6), where the speaker describes a particular girl (statingher name, etc.), the learner deduces from the context thatthe speaker has a particular referent in mind, and thereforeoveruses the. In contrast, in (5), where the speaker deniesall knowledge of who the principal is, the learner decidesthat the speaker does not have a particular referent inmind, and therefore overuses a. In this way, this explicitstrategy overextends the specificity distinction to definitesas well as indefinites, and results in overuse of the withspecific indefinites as well as overuse of a with non-specific definites. Thus, we agree with Trenkic (2008)that adult L2-learners employ an explicit strategy in theirarticle use, paying attention to the presence or absenceof ESK in the context. However, where we disagree withTrenkic is in the source of this strategy: we argue thatthis strategy is based on learners’ underlying sensitivityto specificity.

In indefinite contexts, domain-specific sensitivity tospecificity and the explicit strategy of “use the with aparticular referent” have the same result: overuse of thein indefinite contexts involving ESK. While ESK is by nomeans equivalent to specificity, it is a way of indicatingspecificity even for native English speakers, as discussedin section 4.2. Thus, whether a learner is paying attentionto inherent specificity, or using an overt specificity-basedstrategy, the learner will pay attention to the presence orabsence of ESK.

In definite contexts, on the other hand, a differenceemerges. On the one hand, domain-specific linguisticknowledge tells learners that the specificity distinction isapplicable to indefinite contexts only: definiteness (thepresupposition of uniqueness) must always be marked

with the, regardless of whether the speaker has a particularreferent in mind. The explicit strategy of “use the with aparticular referent”, on the other hand, has a reverse side toit, namely “use a when there isn’t a particular referent” –i.e., when the lack of ESK makes clear that the speaker hasno particular referent in mind. While (most) child learnersmake use of domain-specific linguistic knowledge, andhence do not make a specificity distinction with definites,(most) adult learners are guided by explicit strategies,and therefore overextend the specificity distinction todefinites.

In order to understand the difference between child andadult performance more fully, we now turn to a discussionof explicit and implicit knowledge.

4.4 Explicit and implicit knowledge

Studies of second language acquisition have longbeen concerned about the distinction between moreimplicit, integrated and automatized knowledge, andmore explicit, metalinguistic knowledge. In the generativeframework, implicit knowledge corresponds to domain-specific linguistic knowledge provided to the learnerby Universal Grammar, and hence to true linguisticcompetence (e.g., Gregg, 1989). Native speakers are, bydefinition, competent in their native language, possessingimplicit knowledge; the acquisition of a second languageentails the acquisition of implicit knowledge (Ellis,2005). However, L2-learners also possess much explicitknowledge about the language, in the form of explicitlylearned rules, memorized constructions, metalinguisticknowledge, etc. See Ellis (2005) for an overview of thedebate concerning the relationship between explicit andimplicit knowledge.

A particular point of interest has been the extent towhich particular experimental tasks tap into implicit vs.explicit knowledge (Birdsong, 1989; Ellis, 2005, amongothers). Ellis (2005) argues that more implicit tasks (suchas oral narration and timed grammaticality judgments)are those that involve time pressure and/or focus onmeaning, while more explicit tasks (such as untimedgrammaticality judgments) focus on form and do notinvolve time pressure. Furthermore, learners are likelyto be aware of what rules are being tested only in the moreexplicit tasks.

We believe that the distinctions between explicit andimplicit knowledge, and between explicit and implicittasks, are quite relevant for our data. As discussed above,we propose that learners have both explicit and implicitknowledge about articles: the implicit, domain-specificknowledge takes the form of access to semantic universals,while the explicit knowledge takes the form of an explicitstrategy which overextends the semantic distinction todefinites as well as indefinites. Evidence that adult learnersdo in fact have both types of knowledge available to them




comes from two sources: adult learners’ performance ona more implicit task, and differences among adult learnersin different studies.

Evidence from an implicit taskThe adult L1-Russian and L1-Korean L2-English learnerswhose results are reported by Ionin et al. (2004) tooka written narrative task as well as an article elicitationtask. The written narrative task asked learners to writeshort narratives about important events and objects in theirlives, and did not explicitly target articles. According toEllis’s (2005) criteria, discussed above, this task would beclassified as implicit: it targeted meaning rather than form,and didn’t encourage conscious awareness of linguisticrules. In contrast, the article elicitation tasks used in Ioninet al. (2004) as well as in the present study would beclassified as explicit, like other fill-in-the-blank or forcedchoice tasks.

Interestingly, the finding of the overuse with specificindefinites was supported by the more implicit writtennarrative production task, while overuse of a with non-specific definites was not. In the narration task, L1-Russian L2-English learners overused the with 28% ofspecific indefinites, compared to only 4% of non-specificindefinites, and L1-Korean speakers similarly overusedthe with 13% of specific indefinites, compared to only 2%of non-specific indefinites.15 At the same time, overuseof a with singular definites was relatively low for bothgroups: 1% for L1-Russian speakers, and 6% for L1-Korean speakers; it was furthermore not clear whetherthis overuse of a was tied to non-specificity.

These data on definites may be interpreted in two ways.One possibility is that learners do not morphologicallymark non-specificity on definites in narrative production:learners use the with definites regardless of whetherspecificity has been established, i.e., they do essentiallywhat natural languages do. The other possibility is thatnearly all definite DPs which are found in narratives are[+specific], which means that the occasion for a overusedoes not even arise. Depending on which of these twopossibilities is correct, we either find evidence that L2-English learners do NOT make a specificity distinctionwith definites (the strong view), or we find NO evidencethat learners DO make such a distinction (the weak view).

In contrast, we find compelling evidence that learnersdo make a specificity distinction with indefinites inproduction data. Overuse of the with specific indefinitesis clearly not an artifact of the elicitation task format,while overuse of a with non-specific definites may be

15 These numbers are calculated from Ionin et al. (2004), Table 26.We report here only the results for singular DPs, since this is whereboth the and a might be used. See Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2007)for evidence that the overuse also occurred with specific indefiniteplurals.

such an artifact. We suggest that the explicit nature of theelicitation task leads adult learners to formulate an explicitstrategy which overextends the specificity distinction todefinites; in contrast, in a more implicit task, narrativeproduction, adult learners make the specificity distinctionwith indefinites only, and are therefore more consistentwith cross-linguistic data.

A comparison across studiesImportantly, we would argue that the overextension ofthe specificity distinction to definites is not a necessaryfeature of every adult learner’s article misuse – andconversely, that not every child learner makes thespecificity distinction with indefinites only. In our presentstudy, we did find two children who showed the “adult”pattern, making the specificity distinction with indefinitesas well as definites, and we similarly found one adultwho showed the “child” pattern, making the specificitydistinction with indefinites only.

Nor is this one adult so unusual: if we look acrossmultiple studies testing specificity effects on article choicein adult L2-English, we find that specificity effects oftentend to be greater with indefinites than with definites.For example, Ionin et al. (2004) found that, in a forced-choice elicitation test, adult L1-Korean learners of Englishmade a greater specificity distinction with indefinitesthan with definites while adult L1-Russian speakers madespecificity distinctions of similar magnitude with bothindefinites and definites. Since the two groups took thesame test, this could not be an effect of task type. Norcould it be an effect of the native language: Ionin et al.(2008) found greater specificity effects with indefinitesthan with definites in a group of L1-Russian learners ofEnglish, using the same task that we used in our presentstudy.

Factors that may, to some extent, relate to thedifferences across subject populations, are exposure andproficiency. In the Ionin et al. (2004) study, the Koreanspeakers had more intensive exposure to English thanthe Russian speakers: the Korean speakers were livingin an English-speaking environment as well as studyingEnglish intensively, whereas the Russian speakers camefrom various walks of life, and often did not have veryintensive exposure to English. Possibly as a result of thisincreased exposure, the Korean speakers had, on average,a significantly greater proficiency in English (as measuredby the Michigan test of L2-proficiency) than did theRussian speakers.

Similarly, if we compare the adult L1-Russianpopulation tested by Ionin et al. (2008) to the one inthe present study, we find that the former had both moreexposure to English (by virtue of living in the U.S.,rather than in Russia) and greater English proficiency (asmeasured by a cloze test). While most adult subjects inthe present study had low proficiency, and not a single




subject was advanced, the subjects tested by Ionin et al.(2008) were distributed across three different proficiencylevels (low, intermediate and advanced).

Thus, it is possible that adult L2-learners withgreater proficiency and/or greater immersion in thetarget language are more likely to make the specificitydistinction with indefinites only, whereas learners withlower proficiency and/or less immersion are more likelyto make the specificity distinctions with both indefinitesand definites. These are fairly weak tendencies, andexceptions can be found with individual learners acrossstudies. In contrast, the child L2-learners in the presentstudy showed a strong tendency to make the specificitydistinction with indefinites only, even though the childrenwere not immersed in English, were studying it only in theclassroom, and in fact had less exposure than the adultsin the same study.16

Explicit vs. implicit knowledge, and the role of ageTo sum up the above discussion, we can make thefollowing generalizations: (A) child L2-learners aremore likely than adult L2-learners to be guided bydomain-specific linguistic knowledge, and thus makethe specificity distinction with indefinites, but not withdefinites; in contrast, (B) adult L2-learners make useof an explicit strategy, overextending the specificitydistinction to definites, when responding to an explicitelicitation task; yet (C) if we look at a more implicitwritten narrative task, we find evidence that adult L2-learners are also guided by domain-specific knowledgeof specificity; and furthermore, (D) some adult L2-learners (generally those with greater proficiency and/orgreater exposure to the target language) show evidence ofbeing guided by domain-specific mechanisms, rather thanexplicit strategies, even in an explicit elicitation task.

We argue that children, even ones studying the targetlanguage in a classroom setting, are less likely than adultsto formulate explicit strategies, and more likely to beguided by domain-specific linguistic knowledge. It is well-known that explicit knowledge about language is acquiredby children later than implicit knowledge: for instance,children under the age of five have not yet acquiredmetalinguistic awareness (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, 1979).

16 One could argue that the children included in our data analysiswere pre-selected for high proficiency, given that the majority ofthe children tested had to be excluded due to not passing the fillercut-off. Crucially, those excluded children did NOT pattern with theadults in this study in making the specificity distinction with bothindefinites and definites. Rather, the children who did not meet thefiller cut-off exhibited fairly random behavior on the test items, whichsuggested that the test was simply too difficult for them to complete.The children who were able to understand the test – as evidenced bytheir ability to pass the filler cut-off – were not necessarily of veryhigh proficiency. In fact, their overall accuracy was no different fromthat of the adults in this study, as discussed in section 3.3.

While the children in our study are certainly old enoughto have explicit linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge,we argue that they still make less use of such knowledgethan do adults, and are more guided by domain-specificlinguistic knowledge.

However, we are not arguing for a qualitativedistinction between how children and adults learnlanguage, as proposed under the Fundamental DifferenceHypothesis of Bley-Vroman (1989, 1990). We sawthat some children do appear to rely more on explicitstrategies, while some adults rely more on domain-specificknowledge. We are not in a position to state exactly whatindividual differences (of exposure, proficiency, etc.) areresponsible for a given subject’s behavior.

Note that while there is much literature arguingthat explicit knowledge can, through practice, becomeimplicit knowledge (cf. the STRONG INTERFACE position –Sharwood Smith, 1981; DeKeyser, 1998, among others),we are in a sense proposing the opposite: that explicitknowledge is actually based on implicit knowledge. Weargue that learners come to the language-learning taskequipped with domain-specific knowledge, but that, atleast in the case of adult learners, they also make useof explicit strategies. However, these strategies do notcome out of thin air, but are based on learners’ intuitiveunderstanding of what languages are like – in our case,of what distinctions articles can in principle mark. Thedomain-specific knowledge of how articles work is stillthere, in the learners’ minds, but this knowledge is notaccessed in an explicit task, being instead overridden by anexplicit strategy that the learner has formulated. However,when the task is made more implicit, the domain-specific knowledge may come to the fore; furthermore, wereported suggestive evidence that learners immersed in thetarget language to a greater extent, and/or learners withgreater L2-proficiency, may abandon explicit strategiesaltogether and rely on implicit knowledge.

5. Conclusion

We began this paper by asking whether children and adultsfrom an article-less L1 (Russian) exhibit similar patternsin their acquisition of English articles. We found that theanswer is both yes and no: on the one hand, both adultand child L2-learners are sensitive to specificity in thediscourse context; on the other hand, adults overextendedthe specificity distinction to definites as well as indefinites,while children made the specificity distinction withindefinites only, thus paralleling natural language datamore closely. We have argued that this difference isdue to the role that strategies play in language-learning:while (most) child L2-learners are guided by domain-specific mechanisms, (at least some) adult L2-learnersformulate explicit strategies, which, however, are basedon the underlying sensitivity to specificity. Evidence




from narrative production data (Ionin et al., 2004, 2007)further suggests that this explicit strategy is active only inan explicit elicitation task, and not in a more implicitnarrative task. We argue that there is no qualitativedifference between adult and child L2-learners, becausesome adults (possibly those with more intensive exposureto English) do appear to rely more on domain-specificknowledge than on explicit strategies, and hence makethe specificity distinction with indefinites only. And ofcourse, we should not forget that some L2-learners in ourstudy, children as well as adults, are entirely target-likein their article use. These learners have apparently settledon definiteness, rather than specificity, as the semanticuniversal underlying English article choice (see Ioninet al., 2008, for a discussion of how the input may leadlearners to this decision).

We are now in a position to pinpoint the role that ageplays in the acquisition of English articles: namely, thatolder learners are more likely to let explicit strategiesoverride domain-specific linguistic knowledge. Note thatwhat appears to matter here is age at the time of testing,NOT age of exposure. Many of the adult L2-learners inthis study, as well as in our previous studies, were firstexposed to English as children; however, they still usedexplicit strategies to a greater extent than the child L2-learners in this study. Note further that both child and adultL2-learners in the present study were learning English ina classroom setting, and were not immersed in the targetlanguage; in a sense, the adults in the present study are thechildren in the present study eight years from now (barringthese children’s move to an English-speaking country).Thus, we would actually expect that the children tested inthe present study would use explicit strategies to a greaterextent if they are tested again in about eight years.

Finally, we come back to the issue of first languageacquisition. In this paper, we have argued that child L2-English learners make use of domain-specific knowledge,which involves accessing the semantic universals ofdefiniteness and specificity. Clearly, the same domain-specific knowledge should be available to the firstlanguage learners. If using the to mark specificity is part ofthe acquisition of English articles, then we would expectchild L1-learners, like child L2-learners, to exhibit theoveruse with specific indefinites. In fact, as discussed insection 2.1, there is ample evidence that young English-acquiring children do overuse the with specific reference;in contrast, overuse of a is not attested in L1-acquisition,consistent with what we saw in the case of child L2-acquisition – both in our work with 10–12-year-old L2-learners, and the work of Zdorenko and Paradis (2008)with 5–7-year-old L2-learners.

As discussed earlier, errors of the overuse with specificreference may be given an egocentricity explanation.While this explanation appears quite appropriate for three-year-olds, it becomes less plausible for six-year-olds and

is entirely implausible for 10-year-olds. Thus, we are leftwith two possibilities. Either overuse of the among veryyoung children is due to egocentricity, while overuse ofthe with older children is due to domain-specific linguisticknowledge; or the linguistic explanation applies to bothpopulations. The latter possibility is more parsimonious,as it allows us to advance the same explanation for whatappears to be same phenomenon in different populations.

However, until children of various ages and in differentlearning situations are tested using the same methodology,we cannot be entirely certain that in fact we are dealingwith the same phenomenon across populations. We have toremember that overuse of the among young monolingualchildren is typically found in naturalistic production (e.g.,Brown, 1973) or in oral elicitation tasks involving visualreferents (e.g., Warden, 1976; Schaeffer and Matthewson,2005). Overuse of the in the presence of a visual referentwas found among children as old as seven or eight –both L2-learners (Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008) and nativespeakers (Warden, 1976). In contrast, our study involved awritten elicitation task with no visual referents, and foundoveruse of the among 10–12-year-old child L2-Englishlearners, but not among age-matched L1-English children.Thus, reviewing the studies so far, age and the presenceof a visual referent appear to be confounded. It is an openquestion as to whether six-year-old L1-English childrenwould overuse the in the absence of a visual referent,and conversely, whether 10-year-old L2-English learnerswould have increased overuse of the in the presence ofa visual referent. Until children of a variety of ages aretested with several different methodologies, we cannotknow for certain whether we are dealing with a singlephenomenon or different phenomena (overuse of the tiedto visual salience vs. overuse of the tied to the linguisticconcept of specificity).

At the same time, the child L2-data discussed in thepresent paper close an important gap: all previous studiesof article acquisition focused either on young children oron adults, while our study presents data from somewhatolder, pre-adolescent children. We now know that overuseof the with indefinites is attested across a variety of ages,and are in a position to explore the reasons behind thisoveruse further.

Yet another fruitful direction for future study is thetesting of different populations, children as well as adults,using a variety of methodologies. If in fact adult L2-learners are influenced both by implicit, domain-specificknowledge and by explicit strategies, we would expect thatdifferent tasks would be able to tap more into one type ofknowledge vs. the other. We already saw an indication ofthis in the comparison of narrative production data andelicitation test data with adults. Testing both adult andchild learners using a variety of both oral and written taskswould shed further light on the types of knowledge thatlearners possess. This is true in all grammatical areas, not




only articles, as shown by studies such as Ellis (2005). Infact, recent work by Montrul, Foote and Perpinan (2008)found that adult L2-Spanish learners perform differentlyon explicit vs. implicit tasks testing the same aspectsof Spanish grammar, and that furthermore L2-Spanishlearners pattern differently from heritage speakers ofSpanish.

In the present paper, we have suggested that even in afairly explicit task, children do not make use of explicitstrategies to the same extent as adults. This provides apossible answer to how children and adults differ in theirlanguage-learning abilities. We hope that further workwill be able shed more light on exactly how children andadults make use of explicit and implicit knowledge in theirlanguage development.

References

Aissen, J. (2003). Differential object marking: Iconicity vs.economy. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 21 (3),435–448.

Bickerton, Derek. (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor, MI:Karoma.

Birdsong, D. (1989). Metalinguistic performance and interlin-guistic competence. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Birdsong, D. (ed.) (1999). Second language acquisition andthe Critical Period Hypothesis. Mahwah, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum.

Blass, R. (1990). Relevance relations in discourse: A studywith special reference to Sissala. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Bley-Vroman, R. (1989). The logical problem of secondlanguage learning. In Gass & Schachter (eds.), pp. 41–68.

Bley-Vroman, R. (1990). The logical problem of foreignlanguage learning. Linguistic Analysis, 20, 3–49.

Blom, E. & Polisenska, D. (2006). Verbal inflection andverb placement in first and second language acquisition.In M. Vliegen (ed.), Variation in Sprachtheorie undSpracherwerb: Akten des 39. Linguistischen Kolloquiumsin Amsterdam 2004 (Linguistik International 16), pp. 1–10.Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Boskovic, Z. (2005). On the locality of left branch extractionand the structure of NP. Studia Linguistica, 59, 1–45.

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.

Butler, Y. G. (2002). Second language learners’ theories onthe use of English articles. Studies in Second LanguageAcquisition, 24, 451–480.

Corver, N. (1992). Left branch extraction. In K. Broderick (ed.),Proceedings of NELS 22, pp. 67–84. Amherst. MA: GSLA.

DeKeyser, R. (1998). Beyond focus on form: Cognitiveperspectives on learning and practicing second languagegrammar. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (eds.), Focus onform in second language acquisition, pp. 42–63. New York:Cambridge University Press.

DeKeyser, R. (2000). The robustness of critical period effects insecond language acquisition. Studies in Second LanguageAcquisition, 22, 499–533.

Diesing, M. (1992). Indefinites. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

Dirdal, H. (2005). Second language acquisition of articles andplural marking by Bengali learners of English. Ph.D. thesis,University of Cambridge.

Donnellan, K. S. (1966). Reference and definite descriptions.The Philosophical Review, 75, 281–304. [Reprintedin D. Steinberg & L. Jakobovits (eds.), Semantics:An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics,and psychology, pp. 100–114. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1971.]

Ellis, R. (2005). Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of asecond language: A psychometric study. Studies in SecondLanguage Acquisition, 27, 141–172.

Enc, M. (1991). The semantics of specificity. Linguistic Inquiry,22, 1–25.

Ferrari-Bridgers, F. (2004). The semantics–syntax interfaceof Luganda initial vowel. Presented at the 35th AnnualConference on African Linguistics (ACAL), HarvardUniversity, April 2004.

Fodor, J. D. & Sag, I. A. (1982). Referential and quantificationalindefinites. Linguistics and Philosophy, 5, 355–398.

Fuli, L. T. (2007). Definiteness vs. specificity: An investigationinto the terms used to describe articles in Gagana Samoa.Master’s thesis, the University of Auckland.

Gass, S. & Schachter, J. (eds.) (1989). Linguistic perspectiveson second language acquisition. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Givon, T. (1981). On the development of the numeral “one”as an indefinite marker. Folia Linguistica Historica, 2 (1),35–53.

Givon, T. (2001). Syntax (vol. 1). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Goad, H. & White, L. (2004). Ultimate attainment of L2

inflections: Effects of L1 prosodic structure. In S. Foster-Cohen, M. Sharwood Smith, A. Sorace & M. Ota (eds.),EUROSLA Yearbook 4, pp. 119–145. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.

Gregg, K. (1989). Second language acquisition theory: The casefor a generative perspective. In Gass & Schachter (eds.),pp. 15–40.

Hawkins, R., Al-Eid, S., Almahboob, I., Athanasopoulos,P., Chaengchenkit, R., Hu, J., Rezai, M., Jaensch, C.,Jeon, Y., Jiang, A., Leung, Y.-K., Matsunaga, K., Ortega,M., Sarko, G., Snape, N. & Velasco-Zarate, K. (2006).Accounting for English article interpretation by L2speakers. In S. H. Foster-Cohen, M. Medved Krajnovic &J. Mihaljevic Djigunovic (eds.), EUROSLA Yearbook, pp.7–25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Heim, I. (1991). Artikel und Definitheit [Articles anddefiniteness]. In A. von Stechow & D. Wunderlich (eds.),Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenossischerForschung/Semantics: An international handbook ofcontemporary research, pp. 487–535. Berlin: DeGruyter.

Herschensohn, J. (2007). Language development and age.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huebner, T. (1983). A longitudinal analysis of the acquisition ofEnglish. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.

Huebner, T. (1985). System and variability in interlanguagesyntax. Language Learning, 35, 141–163.




Ionin, T. (2003). Article semantics in second languageacquisition. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. [Distributed byMITWPL.]

Ionin, T. (2006). This is definitely specific: Specificityand definiteness in article systems. Natural LanguageSemantics, 14, 175–234.

Ionin, T., Ko, H. & Wexler, K. (2003). Specificity as agrammatical notion: Evidence from L2-English article use.In G. Garding & M. Tsujimura (eds.), Proceedings ofWCCFL 22, pp. 245–258. Somerville, MA: CascadillaPress.

Ionin, T., Ko, H. & Wexler, K. (2004). Article semantics in L2-acquisition: The role of specificity. Language Acquisition,12, 3–69.

Ionin, T., Ko, H. & Wexler, K. (2007). The role of semanticfeatures in the acquisition of English articles by Russianand Korean speakers. In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl & H.Goodluck (eds.), The role of formal features in secondlanguage acquisition, pp. 226–268. London: Routledge.

Ionin, T. & Montrul, S. (2009). Article use and generic reference:Parallels between L1 and L2 acquisition. In M. d. P. GarcıaMayo & R. Hawkins (eds.), Second language acquisitionof articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [In press in July 2009.]

Ionin, T., Zubizarreta, M. L. & Bautista Maldonado, S. (2008).Sources of linguistic knowledge in the second languageacquisition of English articles. Lingua, 118, 554–576.

Johnson, J. & Newport, E. (1989). Critical period effects insecond language learning: The influence of maturationalstate on the acquisition of English as a second language.Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60–99.

Johnson, J. & Newport, E. (1991). Critical period effects onuniversal properties of languages: The status of subjacencyin the acquisition of a second language. Cognition, 39,215–258.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to childlanguage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kelepir, M. (2001). Topics in Turkish syntax: Clausal structureand scope. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. [Distributed byMITWPL.]

Ko, H., Ionin, T. & Wexler, K. (2006). Adult L2-learners lackthe maximality presupposition, too! In K. U. Deen, J.Nomura, B. Schulz & B. D. Schwartz (eds), Proceedingsof the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approachesto Language Acquisition–North America (GALANA 1;University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics4), pp. 171–182. Honolulu, HI.

Krifka, M., Pelletier, F. J., Carlson, G., ter Meulen, A., Chierchia,G. & Link, G. (1995). Genericity: An introduction. In G.Carlson & J. Pelletier (eds.), The generic book, pp. 1–124.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Kupisch, T. (2006). The acquisition of determiners in bilingualGerman–Italian and German–French children. Munich:Lincom Europa.

Kupisch, T. & Koops, C. (2006). The definite article in non-specific noun phrases: Comparing French and Italian.In E. Stark, E. Leiss & W. Abraham (eds.), Nominaldetermination typology: Context constraints and historicalemergence, pp. 187–210. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lazarova-Nikovska, A. (2005). Age and transfer effects in theinitial stages of second language acquisition of English.Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.

Lee, D. & Schachter, J. (1998). Sensitive period effects in bindingtheory. Language Acquisition, 6, 333–362.

Leonetti, M. (2004). Specificity and differential object markingin Spanish. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 3, 75–114.

Leung, Y.-K. (2001). The initial state of L3A: Full transfer andfailed features? In X. Bonch-Bruevich, W. J. Crawford, J.Hellermann, C. Higgins & H. Nguyen (eds.), The past,present and future of second language research: Selectedproceedings of the 2000 Second Language Research Forum,pp. 55–75. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Lyons, C. (1999). Definiteness. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Maclaran, R. (1982). The semantics and pragmatics ofthe English demonstratives. Ph.D. dissertation, CornellUniversity.

Maratsos, M. (1976). The use of definite and indefinite referencein young children. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Matthewson, L., Bryant, T. & Roeper, T. (2001). A Salishstage in the acquisition of English determiners: Unfamiliar“definites”. Proceedings of SULA: The semantics ofunder-represented languages in the Americas (Universityof Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 25),pp. 63–71. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts.

Montrul, S., Foote, R. & Perpinan, S. (2008). Gender agreementin adult second language learners and Spanish heritagespeakers: The effects of age and context of acquisition.Language Learning 58, 503–553.

Mosel, U. & Hovdhaugen, E. (1992). Samoan referencegrammar. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

Murphy, S. (1997). Knowledge and production of Englisharticles by advanced second language learners. Ph.D.dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

Parrish, B. (1987). A new look at methodologies in the study ofarticle acquisition for learners of ESL. Language Learning,37, 361–383.

Pereltsvaig, A. (2007). The universality of DP: A view fromRussian. Studia Linguistica, 61, 59–94.

Perez-Leroux, A., Munn, A., Schmitt, C. & DeIrish, M. (2004).Learning definite determiners: Genericity and definitenessin English and Spanish. BUCLD 28 Proceedings Supple-ment. http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/supp.html (retrieved 21 May 2008), 12 pp.

Prince, E. (1981). On the inferencing of indefinite-this NPs. InA. K. Joshi, B. L. Webber & I. A. Sag (eds.), Elementsof discourse understanding, pp. 231–250. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Robertson, D. (2000). Variability in the use of the English articlesystem by Chinese learners of English. Second LanguageResearch, 16, 135–172.

Schaeffer, J. & Matthewson, L. (2005). Grammar and pragmaticsin the acquisition of article systems. Natural Language &Linguistic Theory, 23, 53–101.

Schwartz, B. D. (1992). Testing between UG-based and problem-solving models of L2A: Developmental sequence data.Language Acquisition, 2, 1–19.




Schwartz, B. D. (2003). Child L2 acquisition: Paving the way. InB. Beachley, A. Brown & F. Conlin (eds.), Proceedingsof the 27th Annual Boston University Conference onLanguage Development, pp. 26–50. Somerville, MA:Cascadilla Press.

Schwartz, B. D. (2004). Why child L2-acquisition? In J. vanKampen & S. Bauuw (eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2003,pp. 47–66. Utrecht: LOT, University of Utrecht.

Serratrice, L. (2000). The emergence of functional categoriesin bilingual language acquisition. Ph.D. dissertation,University of Edinburgh.

Sharwood Smith, M. (1981). Consciousness-raising and thesecond language learner. Applied Linguistics, 2, 159–169.

Singleton, D. & Lengyel, Z. (eds.) (1995). The age factorin second language acquisition: A critical look atthe critical period hypothesis. Clevedon: MultilingualMatters.

Slabakova, R. (2006). Learnability in the second languageacquisition of a semantic parameter. Second LanguageResearch, 22, 498–523.

Song, H.-S. & Schwartz, B. D. (2009). Testing the FundamentalDifference Hypothesis: L2 adult, L2 child, and L1 childcomparisons in the acquisition of Korean wh-constructionswith negative polarity items. Studies in Second LanguageAcquisition, 31, 323–361.

Sorace, A. (2000). Syntactic optionality in non-native grammars.Second Language Research, 16, 93–102.

Thomas, M. (1989). The acquisition of English articles by first-and second-language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics,10, 335–355.

Torrego, E. (1998). The dependency of objects. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

Trenkic, D. (2000). The acquisition of English articles by Serbianspeakers. Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.

Trenkic, D. (2004). Definiteness in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnianand some implications for the general structure of thenominal phrase. Lingua, 114, 1401–1427.

Trenkic, D. (2007). Variability in L2 article production: Beyondthe representational deficits vs. processing constraintsdebate. Second Language Research, 23, 289–327.

Trenkic, D. (2008). The representation of English articles insecond language grammars: Determiners or adjectives?Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 1–18.

Tryzna, M. (2009). Questioning the validity of the Article ChoiceParameter and the Fluctuation Hypothesis: Evidence fromL2 English article use by L1 Polish and L1 MandarinChinese speakers. In M. d. P. Garcıa Mayo & R. Hawkins(eds.), Second language acquisition of articles: Empiricalfindings and theoretical implications. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins. [In press in July 2009.]

Unsworth, S. (2005). Child L2, Adult L2, child L1: Differencesand similarities. A study on the acquisition of direct objectscrambling in Dutch. Ph.D. thesis, Utrecht University.

Warden, D. (1976). The influence of contexts on children’s useof identifying expressions and references. British Journalof Psychology, 67, 101–112.

Wexler, K. (2003). Maximal trouble. Presented at the CUNYHuman Sentence Processing Conference, MIT.

Yang, M. & Ionin, T. (2009). Specificity and speaker knowledgein the second language acquisition of English articles. Ms.,Guangdong University of Foreign Studies & University ofIllinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Young, R. (1996). Form–function relations in articles in Englishinterlanguage. In R. Bayley & D. R. Preston. (eds.), Secondlanguage acquisition and linguistic variation, pp. 135–175.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Zdorenko, T. & Paradis, J. (2008). The acquisition of articlesin child second language English: Fluctuation, transfer orboth? Second Language Research, 24, 227–250.

Zlatic, L. (1997). The structure of the Serbian noun phrase. Ph.D.dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

Received: October 3, 2007Final revision received: May 21, 2008Accepted: July 12, 2008


acquisition of article semantics by child and adult l1-english learners

Documents

leaga le ulu

tam bad sp

left branch extraction

critical period hypothesis

differential object marking

l1 held constant

fundamental difference hypothesis

critical period effects