What transfers (or doesn’t) in the second language acquisition of English articles by learners from article-less native languages?

Ionin, Tania; Choi, Sea Hee; Liu, Qiufen

doi:10.1075/lab.19057.ion

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The acquisition of articles in the multilingual context, also from article-less languages, has been recently studied in, among others, Hermas (2018); Agebjörn (2021); Jensen et al (2021); Ionin et al (2022), or Cho (2022. Agebjörn (2021), though focusing on L2A, provides data which could inform the interpretation of our results.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 74%

How syntactic gradience in L1 affects L3 acquisition

Żychliński,

Skałba,

Wrembel

et al. 2023

LAB

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The article reports on a longitudinal study of syntactic cross-linguistic influence (CLI) among L1 Polish learners of L2 English and L3 Norwegian. The study mainly aimed to determine the influence of gradience in L1 on third language acquisition. To this end, four syntactic properties were tested, two of which exhibit similarity between Polish and Norwegian (subject-oriented possessive pronouns and adverb placement), and the other two – between English and Norwegian (definite and indefinite articles). A group of 24 learners of Norwegian participated in an acceptability judgment task, which was administered at three data collection times in all three languages. It aimed not only to determine the presence (and sources) of CLI, but also to observe how gradience in L1 affects the assessment of equivalent properties in L3. In order to assess the role played by gradience, the trilinguals’ performance was compared to that of a control group of English-Norwegian bilinguals. The data were analyzed with mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression modelling, which showed statistically significant differences in the ratings of articles between the two groups. We attribute this finding to gradient acceptability characterizing subject-oriented pronouns and adverb placement in Polish, which is a potential source of non-facilitative CLI.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 74%

How syntactic gradience in L1 affects L3 acquisition

Żychliński,

Skałba,

Wrembel

et al. 2023

LAB

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show abstract

“…In summary, previous studies have investigated the acquisition of English articles by L2 learners whose mother tongue is a language with or without articles. However, recent and rare attention has been paid to the issue of whether the Full Transfer Hypothesis or the Partial Transfer Hypothesis holds true (Ionin et al, 2022). Therefore, the present study attempts to probe the production of English articles by Mandarin-speaking college students, who acquire English as a foreign language.…”

Section: Previous Studies On the Acquisition Of English Articlesmentioning

confidence: 98%

The Acquisition of English Articles by Chinese EFL College Students

2024

International Journal of TESOL Studies

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This paper reports the empirical consequences on the effect of cross-linguistic transfer in the acquisition of English articles by Chinese EFL college students. In contrast to English, Mandarin Chinese is an article-less language. Moreover, the two languages differ from each other in the denotation of semantic features such as definiteness, indefiniteness and genericity, etc. It remains unknown whether the cross-linguistic difference is transferable. To evaluate this possibility, the present study tested 20 English-learning Chinese college students in two experiments, respectively using a sentence completion task and a cloze task. The main findings were as follows across the two experiments. First, the participants performed better in the use of a/an than that of the. Second, a subset of the participants appeared to use bare NPs to denote genericity and singularity. Third, some participants had difficulty in the acquisition of genericity encoded by the and a/an. Fourth, some participants failed to tease apart the use of a and an. Taken together, the findings appear to support the Full Transfer Hypothesis. We discussed the implications of the findings in terms of cross-linguistic transfer theories.

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“…Following Ionin et al (2022) and Ahn (2021), raw reading times (RTs) smaller than 100 ms and larger than 2,500 ms were deleted. RTs were further trimmed at ±3 standard deviations (SDs) or more of the mean of each participant and condition.…”

Section: Data Cleaning and Descriptive Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scalar implicatures in adult L2 learners: A self-paced reading study

Cho

2022

Second Language Research

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Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean–L2-English speakers’ processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like Some/All elephants have trunks and ears. Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e. slower reading) to underinformative scalar sentences relative to non-scalar sentences, but second language (L2) speakers did not. These results are interpreted in support of the Relevance Theory claim that scalar implicature generation is modulated by contextual and individual factors, in particular by the language condition, that is, whether sentences are presented in L1-English versus L2-English.

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What transfers (or doesn’t) in the second language acquisition of English articles by learners from article-less native languages?

Cited by 7 publications

References 24 publications

How syntactic gradience in L1 affects L3 acquisition

How syntactic gradience in L1 affects L3 acquisition

The Acquisition of English Articles by Chinese EFL College Students

Scalar implicatures in adult L2 learners: A self-paced reading study

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