The acquisition of the English determiner phrase by L2 learners

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.

Autorentext
Dr. Neal Snape graduated from the University of Essex with a PhD
in Language and Linguistics. He spent one year as a post
doctorate researcher at the University of Calgary. In 2007, he
took up a teaching position at Hokkaido University. He is
currently an Assistant Professor at Gunma Prefectural Women's
University.

Klappentext
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.