The influence of L1 typology on the acquisition of the L2 English Article: A large-scale corpus study

We present a corpus investigation of the influence of L1-L2 typological similarity on theacquisition of the L2 English article. We consider item-level typological similarity in terms ofthe availability of an article in the L1, but also broader typological similarity in terms of thelinguistic distance between L1 and L2 as captured through a variety of lexical, morphosyntacticand phonological measures of linguistic distance. We analyse the accuracy of the use of thedefinite and indefinite English articles in around 0.5 million writings from learners with eleventypologically diverse L1s. The data are sampled from an open access EFL corpus,EFCAMDAT. Our results indicate that L1 influence arises from a combination of item levelL1-L2 differences, that is, the availability of an article in the L1, as well as broader propertiesof the L1 grammar, as captured by linguistic distance measures. The results indicate that it isthe availability of the definite article in the L1 that predicts article omission in L2 English, forboth the definite and indefinite articles. This finding supports the generative typologicaldistinction between determiner phrase (DP) and noun phrase (NP) languages, indicating thatthe availability of a definite article and a DP predicts the use of bare nominals in the L1 andconsequently, article omission in L2 English.