Abstract/Summary

Studies on the acquisition of indefinite articles by sequential bilingual (L2) children have provided mixed results regarding whether L2 children omit or substitute indefinite articles. In the present paper, we examined whether Turkish-speaking child L2 learners of English omitted or substituted indefinite articles by using a production task that comprised two different semantic contexts, the referential specific and the non-referential predicational context. We also examined the source of children’s errors by using a self-paced listening task where children heard grammatical sentence where indefinite articles were present and ungrammatical sentences with omitted indefinite articles. L2 children’s performance was compared with that of two monolingual (L1) groups: an age-matched L1 group and a younger L1 group. Results showed that all groups of children distinguished between the two semantic contexts in both the production and the on-line processing task. At the same time, both groups of older L1 and L2 children’s errors consisted in omission of indefinite articles whereas the predominant error for the younger L1 children was substitutions. In the on-line processing task, all groups of children detected the ungrammaticality related to article omission. We interpret these results within the Feature Reassembly and the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypotheses.