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 first language – second language (L1–L2) typological similarity on the acquisition of the L2 English article. We consider item-level typological similarity in terms of the availability of an article in the L1, but also broader typological similarity in terms of the linguistic distance between L1 and L2 as captured through a variety of lexical, morphosyntactic and phonological measures of linguistic distance. We analyse the accuracy of the use of the definite and indefinite English articles in around 0.5 million writings from learners with 11 typologically diverse L1s. The data are sampled from an open access English as a foreign language (EFL) corpus, EFCAMDAT. Our results indicate that L1 influence arises from a combination of item level L1–L2 differences, that is, the availability of an article in the L1, as well as broader properties of the L1 grammar, as captured by linguistic distance measures. The results indicate that it is the availability of the definite article in the L1 that predicts article omission in L2 English, for both the definite and indefinite articles. This finding supports the generative typological distinction between determiner phrase (DP) and noun phrase (NP) languages, indicating that the availability of a definite article and a DP predicts the use of bare nominals in the L1 and consequently, article omission in L2 English.