The Acquisition of the English Determiner Phrase by L2 Learners: Japanese and Spanish

The acquisition of articles in English is notoriously difficult for second language (L2) learners of languages without articles. The current thesis extends this work on L2 English by investigating speakers whose L1s are Japanese and Spanish. Japanese is an article-less language, while Spanish marks definiteness and plural, like English. Specifically, the investigation tests the success of the existing hypotheses in accounting for the performance of these speakers in a series of experimental tasks. Additionally it examines whether a 'nominal mapping parameter' proposed by Chierchia (1998), which determines whether bare NPs in a language are argumental, predicative or of both types, provides insight into L2 learners' knowledge of the English nominal domain. Overall, the Spanish L2 learners behaved much more like the native speakers on all the tasks. It is argued that the findings are consistent with the Full Transfer/Partial Access (Hawkins & Chan 1997) and Full Transfer/Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996) hypotheses.