Exploring Mandarin Chinese speakers' L2 article use

This paper attempts to explore the difficulties Chinese speakers have with the acquisition of English articles by situating itself within three hypotheses by using two tasks; a written forced choice elicitation task and an oral elicited picture description task. Our findings from the first task are consistent with the Fluctuation Hypothesis. Our findings from the second task are not fully consistent with the Representational Deficit Hypothesis or the strong interpretation of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis as omission of articles is low. This indicates that L2 learners are perhaps able to access uninterpretable features and target-like prosodic representations even at intermediate levels, which is consistent with the view of full access to syntax and phonological structures via Universal Grammar.

Published online: 14 January 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.47.05sna