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Article published In:
Three Factors and Beyond: Socio-syntax and language acquisition
Edited by Kleanthes K. Grohmann
[Linguistic Variation 14:1] 2014
► pp. 46–68

The state of the article

Patterns in the production of English articles by Thai learners

| Thammasat University

English articles represent one of the most challenging areas of second language acquisition for learners whose L1 lacks articles. The two studies presented here examine the developmental sequence of acquisition, the first through a cross-sectional analysis of Thai learners at different levels of overall English proficiency, the second through a longitudinal experiment in which learners were exposed to semantically-tailored tokens of article use, but without any explicit or meta-linguistic instruction. It is argued that the data do not show evidence of abrupt parameter resetting. Instead, the developmental patterns fit well with Yang’s variational model of acquisition. Keywords: L2 acquisition; article systems; determiners; definiteness; specificity

Published online: 25 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14.1.03win
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