Cross-Linguistic Analysis of English Article Acquisition: A Comparative Study of L1 Korean and L1 Arabic Speakers

This study explores Bošković's (2008 et seq.) NP/DPdistinction with respect to Korean and Arabic, with a focus on definiteness. First, some distinctive syntactic properties across languages are examined, which reveals that Arabic is generally near-DP on the NP ⇔ DP scale. Furthermore, Arabic is categorized as a weak DP language, whereas Korean and English are strong NP and DP languages, respectively. Second, this study investigates how Arabic learners, whose L1 has the definite article al-, and Korean learners, whose L1 lacks articles, acquire English definiteness. Both groups often select the in [+specific] contexts, which reflects a preference for specificity over definiteness. This suggests the influence of L1 transfer or Universal Grammar on the acquisition of English articles.