Second Language Acquisition

It is widely reported that second language speakers of English diverge from native speakers in their use of articles; they omit articles, and they assign interpretations to articles that are not those assigned by native speakers. Many studies have focused on speakers whose L1s lack articles. Within the framework of the Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis, a number of proposals have emerged: learners have difficulty mapping abstract syntactic representations into phonological form, or they have difficulty with 'feature assembly' in the L2. This book provides new evidence from speakers of Syrian Arabic and French. The results suggest that both Syrian Arabic and French speakers use English articles differently from speakers of L1s that lack articles, and differently from each other. It is argued that the findings are consistent with Full Transfer of the properties of the L1 initially, followed by restructuring towards target use of English articles, consistent with Full Access to Universal Grammar. Persistent non-target-like use of articles appears to be a problem of 'feature re- assembly'.