Accounting for Article Interpretation in L2 English by L1 Japanese Child Learners

Abstract

This paper tests the predictions of the Article Choice Parameter (Ionin, Ko, & Wexler, 2004) against individual data from Japanese child second language (L2) learners of English. Ionin et al. (2004) and Ionin, Zubizarreta, and Philippov (2009) proposed the Fluctuation Hypothesis for explaining L2 learners' choice of English articles. Ionin et al. (2009) argued that Russian child L2 learners of English can access the Article Choice Parameter but they fluctuate between the two settings, definiteness and specificity. In a replication study, Yamada and Miyamoto (2010) showed that Japanese child L2 learners of English incorrectly chose definite article the for a [-definite, +specific] context in their L2 English, as found in previous child L2 acquisition studies (Zdorenko & Paradis, 2008). However, Hawkins et al. (2006) and Trenkic (2008) point out that the status of the Article Choice Parameter as a theoretical construct and the validity of it are unclear. As a result, the current study re-examined child data in Yamada and Miyamoto (2010) by focusing on the individual results rather than focusing on group results. We reveal that the children's article interpretation actually varied, which the Article Choice Parameter cannot explain sufficiently. We show how a feature-based, the Distributed Morphology account (Halle & Marantz, 1993; Harley & Noyer, 1999), could clarify the process of acquiring the correct composition of features relating to English articles.