The Emergence of Second Language Categorisation of the English Article Construction

Abstract

This study examines the emergent cognitive categorisation of the English article construction among second language (L2) learners. One hundred and fourteen Mandarin-L1 learners of English, divided into two L2 proficiency levels (low-to-intermediate and advanced), were measured by a computer-based cloze test for the accuracy and response time of appropriate use of English articles in sentential contexts. Results showed that when learners acquired the polysemous English article construction they demonstrated stronger competence in differentiating individual form-function mappings in the article construction. L2 learners’ patterns of article construction usage were shaped by semantic functions. Learners performed better on the definiteness category than on the non-definiteness categories, suggesting that learners were sensitive to the prototypicality of nominal grounding. Advanced learners demonstrated an increased sensitivity to semantic idiosyncrasy, but they lacked contextualised constructional knowledge. Competition among the functional categories and restructuring of functional categories are important ways of regularization that learners go through to acquire semantically complex systems such as articles.

Modeling Input Factors in Second Language Acquisition of the English Article Construction

“…They became more knowledgeable about cue competition in the article system. They could allocate more attention to particular elements in discourse (Kilborn and Cooreman, 1987) and to the cueing of article forms by structural and contextual features (Zhao, 2020). These are good evidence suggesting that the learners in our sample with a higher level of L2 competence have shown patterns of article cue usage that approximate the native speaker norm, whereas lower-level learners failed to do so.…”