Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12 (3), 2009, 337–361 

C 2009 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1366728909990149 337

TA N I A IO N I N
Acquisition of article semantics University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
by child and adult L2-English M A R ÍA LUISA Z UBIZARRETA
University of Southern California
learners∗ VADIM PHILIPPOV
Orel State University (Russia)

This paper examines article use in the L2-English of adult and child speakers of Russian, an article-less language. In earlier
work on articles in adult L2-English, Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004) proposed that speakers of article-less L1s fluctuate
between dividing English articles on the basis of definiteness vs. specificity, as a result of direct access to semantic universals.
The present paper examines whether similar fluctuation is present for child L2-English learners. Results of an elicitation
study with L1-Russian child and adult learners of English show that both groups of learners exhibit sensitivity to definiteness
as well as specificity. At the same time, it is found that the behavior of child L2-learners is more consistent with natural
language data than that of adult L2-learners. It is proposed that both children and adults have domain-specific knowledge of
semantic universals, but that adults, unlike children, also use explicit strategies. This proposal is considered in light of the
literature on explicit vs. implicit knowledge.

A major question in the field of second language (L2)
acquisition concerns whether children and adults acquire a
second language in the same way. Traditionally, the focus
of much literature on critical periods in L2-acquisition
has been on ultimate attainment: whether L2-learners
who began acquiring the L2 in childhood (early learners)
outperform those who did not begin the acquisition until
adulthood (late learners). The general finding has been that
early L2-learners tend to outperform late L2-learners on
tests of L2-grammar, although researchers disagree as to
whether the source of this difference is biological, social,
or input-driven, with evidence against critical periods
coming from the cases of near-native late L2-learners
(see, among many others: Johnson and Newport, 1989,
1991; Lee and Schachter, 1998; DeKeyser, 2000; and the
papers in Singleton and Lengyel, 1995, and in Birdsong,
1999; see Herschensohn, 2007, for an overview).
More recently, L2-researchers have begun to examine
the PROCESSES at work in child vs. adult L2-acquisition
(see, for instance, Lazarova-Nikovska, 2005; Unsworth,
2005; Blom and Polišenská, 2006; Song and Schwartz,
* We would like to thank our undergraduate research assistants,
Jomeline Balatayo, Erin Bardales, Anna Bokarius, Erin Kunkle and
Matthew Wallace for their help with the data collection and analysis
in the U.S., and students at Orel State University for their help with
the data collection in Russia. We are grateful to William Rutherford
for allowing us the use of his cloze test for measuring L2-learners’
proficiency. The research reported here is supported by NSF grant #
BCS-0444088 (Principal Investigator: Marı́a Luisa Zubizarreta) and
by a University of Southern California undergraduate research grant.
We are grateful to Silvina Montrul and to three anonymous reviewers
for comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Address for correspondence:
Tania Ionin, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 South Mathews Ave.,
Urbana, IL 61801, USA
tionin@uiuc.edu
2009; and the discussion in Schwartz, 1992, 2003, 2004).
The focus of these studies has been on whether child
L2-learners and adult L2-learners exhibit similar patterns
during the course of acquisition. This issue has important
implications for the discussion of whether L2-learners
have access to Universal Grammar (UG). L2-researchers
working in the generative framework generally agree that
child L2-learners have access to UG, while there is much
more debate concerning whether adults do as well. As laid
out by Schwartz (1992, 2003, 2004), similar patterns of
development of child and adult L2-learners, with the L1
held constant, provide evidence that adult L2-acquisition,
like child L2-acquisition, is UG-constrained.
Child/adult parallels have typically been investigated
in the domains of syntax (or syntax/semantics interface)
and morphology, such as object scrambling (Unsworth,
2005) and inflectional morphology (Blom and Polišenská,
2006). To our knowledge, there has been no work directly
examining the acquisition of fine-grained semantic
distinctions by child vs. adult L2-learners. The main goal
of the present paper is to add to the existing literature
on age effects in L2-acquisition by examining whether
child and adult L2-learners exhibit similar patterns in their
acquisition of English articles.
Article choice is a particularly fruitful area for this
investigation, for several reasons. First, articles are
notorious for being quite difficult for L2-English learners
to master. Second, nearly all investigations of article
meaning (as opposed to just article use/omission) in L2-
acquisition that we are aware of have been done with
adult learners (an important exception, discussed below,
is Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008), so there is little or no

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 338 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
information of how age might affect acquisition of article
semantics. And finally, Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004) have
specifically argued that L2-English learners whose L1s
lack articles have direct, UG-mediated access to semantic
universals underlying article use. This argument for UG-
involvement would receive support if the same patterns
were found with child as with adult L2-learners, on the
assumption that child L2-learners have access to UG.
Building on the Ionin et al. (2004) study, we will com-
pare article (mis)use among adult and child L2-English
learners from the same article-less L1 (Russian), and show
that there are both similarities and differences between the
two age groups. The data reported here are part of a larger
study comparing L2-English article use among adult and
child speakers of Russian and Spanish (see also Ionin,
Zubizarreta and Bautista Maldonado, 2008).
On the one hand, we will show that the effects of
specificity that Ionin et al. (2004) found in adult L2-
English article use are also present for child L2-English
learners, supporting the view that learners’ patterns of
article (mis)use are UG-related. On the other hand, we
will show that the patterns exhibited by child L2-learners
are more consistent with natural language data than those
exhibited by adult L2-learners. We will propose that while
both children and adults have domain-specific linguistic
knowledge of definiteness and specificity, adults also
make use of explicit strategies, to a greater extent than
children. We will discuss the implications of these findings
for the study of article use in child L1, child L2, and adult
L2-acquisition, and for explicit and implicit knowledge
more generally.
This paper is organized as follows. In section 1, we
discuss previous findings with adult L2-English learners,
and reconsider the original proposal of Ionin et al. (2004)
in light of new cross-linguistic data. Section 2 provides an
overview of studies on the acquisition of English articles
by young children, and discusses the motivation for
doing child–adult comparisons. In section 3, we present
the methods and results of the present study. Section 4
discusses these findings and puts forth our proposal.
Section 5 concludes the paper with a discussion of how
L2-acquisition of articles compares to L1-acquisition of
articles.
1. Adult L2-acquisition of English articles
The acquisition of English articles by adult L2-learners
has been much investigated (see, among many others,
Huebner, 1983, 1985; Parrish, 1987; Thomas, 1989;
Young, 1996; Murphy, 1997; Robertson, 2000; Trenkic,
2000, 2007, 2008; Leung, 2001; Goad and White, 2004;
Ionin et al., 2004, 2008). In this paper, we focus in
particular on recent work examining the patterns for
article (mis)use in L2-English (as opposed to article
omission), and on the reasons behind these patterns.
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1.1 L2-English articles and specificity
Many of the early studies on L2-English articles used
Bickerton’s (1981) framework for classifying articles
on the basis of the features of SPECIFIC REFERENCE and
HEARER KNOWLEDGE. However, these features were not
given precise semantic entries. Ionin (2003), adopting
existing semantic analyses of definiteness and specificity
(see Heim, 1991; Lyons, 1999), proposed that L2-
English article choice should be viewed in terms of
SPECIFICITY AS SPEAKER INTENT TO REFER and DEFINITENESS
AS PRESUPPOSITION OF UNIQUENESS. Informal definitions of
these semantic features (from Ionin et al., 2004) are given
in (1). The formal definition of definiteness adopted in
these studies is the Fregean analysis of definiteness, from
Heim (1991), while the formal definition of specificity
was developed by Ionin (2003, 2006), based on Fodor and
Sag’s (1982) concept of referentiality.
(1) If a Determiner Phrase (DP) of the form [D NP] is . . .
a. [+definite], then the speaker assumes that the
hearer shares the presupposition of the existence
of a unique individual in the set denoted by NP.
b. [+specific], then the speaker intends to refer to
a unique individual in the set denoted by the
NP, and considers this individual to possess some
noteworthy property.
Ionin et al. (2004) proposed that definiteness and
specificity are semantic universals which underlie article
choice cross-linguistically.1 English and many other
western European languages morphologically encode
definiteness in their article systems, but not specificity.
This is illustrated by the examples in (2), which show that
the is used in contexts that are [+definite], as in (2a–b), and
a in contexts that are [−definite], as in (2c–d), regardless
of whether the context is [+specific] or [−specific].
(2) a. [+definite, +specific] context
I want to talk to the winner of this race – she is a
good friend of mine.
b. [+definite, −specific] context
I want to talk to the winner of this race – whoever
that happens to be.
c. [−definite, +specific] context
Professor Robertson is meeting with a student
from her class – my best friend Alice.
1 It is important to note that this proposal is concerned exclusively
with articles in NON-GENERIC environments. Following Ionin et al.
(2004), we do not examine article use in generic contexts (e.g., Lions
are dangerous animals, The lion is a dangerous animal, etc.). See
Krifka et al. (1995) for an overview of the semantics of genericity,
and Pérez-Leroux, Munn, Schmitt and DeIrish (2004) on genericity
in first language acquisition. For recent work on genericity in second
language acquisition, see Slabakova (2006) and Ionin and Montrul
(2009).
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
Table 1. Article grouping cross-linguistically: two-article languages (from Ionin et al.
2004).
d. [−definite, −specific] context
Professor Robertson is meeting with a student
from her class – I don’t know which one.
On the other hand, colloquial/spoken English does
encode specificity on indefinites, with a destressed form
of the demonstrative this (see Prince, 1981; Maclaran,
1982; Ionin, 2006). The use of this as a specificity
marker on indefinites is illustrated in (3). Note that this
is interchangeable with a in (3b), supporting the proposal
that it marks indefinites. At the same time, the distribution
of indefinite this is more restricted than that of a: while
both examples in (3) allow a, only (3b) allows this. Ionin
(2006) analyzes such contrasts as follows: the speaker
intends to refer to a particular stamp in (3b), where the
stamp carries a noteworthy property of being worth a
fortune; however, the speaker does not intend to refer
to a particular stamp in (3a), where there is nothing
noteworthy about the stamp under discussion. As a result,
the conditions on specificity, as given in (1b), are met in
(3b) but not in (3a).
√ English as if it were Samoan. According to the predictions
(3) a. He put on a/#this 31 cent stamp on the envelope,
so he must√want
√ it to go airmail.
b. He put on a/ this 31 cent stamp on the envelope,
and only realized later that it was worth a fortune
because it was unperforated.
(Maclaran, 1982, p. 88)
While indefinite this marks specificity on indefinites
only, Ionin (2003, 2006) proposed that languages may
in principle encode the specificity distinction with both
definites and indefinites. Drawing on Samoan data from
Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992), Ionin (2003, 2006)
suggested that the Samoan articles le and se encode the
specificity distinction regardless of definiteness: le is used
in both [+definite, +specific] and [−definite, +specific]
contexts, while se is used in both [+definite, −specific] and
[−definite, −specific] contexts. This difference between
English and Samoan is represented in Table 1.
In a series of studies, Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2003)
and Ionin et al. (2004) formulated and tested predictions
of how the semantics of specificity is relevant for L2-
acquisition of English articles by speakers whose L1s
lack articles. Ionin et al. proposed that in such cases, UG
provides the learners with the options for article semantics
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339
Table 2. Patterns of English article use by speakers of
article-less L1s: predictions (from Ionin et al. 2004).
[+definite]: target the [−definite]: target a
[+specific] correct use of the overuse of the
[−specific] overuse of a correct use of a
that are available in natural language, including those
options that are not instantiated in either the learners’ L1
or their L2. Ionin et al. hypothesized that in the absence of
articles in their L1, L2-English learners would have access
to both definiteness and specificity but would not, at least
initially, know that English articles encode definiteness
rather than specificity.
The predicted result would be FLUCTUATION between
these two semantic options: some of the time, learners
would treat the as marking definiteness (and a indefinite-
ness), and some of the time they would treat the as marking
specificity (and a non-specificity) – essentially, treating
of this Fluctuation Hypothesis (Ionin et al., 2004), learners
should perform accurately on the categories of specific
definites and non-specific indefinites, where the two
options give the same results. When definiteness and
specificity are in conflict, on the other hand – on the cat-
egories of specific indefinites and non-specific definites –
learners are predicted to use the and a interchangeably.
The four relevant categories are illustrated in (4)–(7),
with the predictions for L2-article use stated.2 The
predicted pattern of article use is schematized in Table 2.
Crucially, the pattern in Table 2 is non-random: learners
are predicted to make errors in only two out of four
different environments. (For more discussion of the role
of OPTIONALITY in L2-acquisition, see Sorace, 2000.)
(4) [+definite, +specific]: target the
predicted learner pattern: correct use of the
Louise:Where’s your mother?
2 The items in (4)–(7) come from the test instrument used in the present
study, discussed later in this paper, and are modeled on the test items
in Ionin et al. (2004). Like Ionin et al. (2004), we restrict our attention
to singular DPs. See Ionin et al. (2003) for evidence that a similar
pattern was obtained for plural DPs.
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 340 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
Julie: She is meeting the principal of my brother’s
elementary school. He is a very nice man. He is
talking to my mother about my brother’s grades.
(5) [+definite, −specific]: target the
predicted learner pattern: overuse of a
Ruby: It’s already 4 p.m. Why isn’t your little
brother home from school?
Angela: He just called and told me that he got in
trouble! He is talking to the principal of his
school! I don’t know who that is. I hope my
brother comes home soon.
(6) [−definite, +specific]: target a
predicted learner pattern: overuse of the
Grandfather comes for a visit
Grandfather: Where is my little granddaughter Beth?
Is she home?
Father: No . . . She is not going to be back till
late. She is having dinner with a girl
from class – her name is Angie, and
Beth really likes her.
(7) [−definite, −specific]: target a
predicted learner pattern: correct use of a
Mother comes home
Mother: How did Peter spend the day at his
grandmother’s?
Father: He had a good time. He did his homework for
tomorrow. Then he went outside and played
with a little girl – I don’t know who it was.
Then he came back inside; and then I came
and took him home.
Ionin et al. (2004) tested the predictions in Table 2 with
two groups of adult L2-English learners residing in the
U.S.: L1-Russian speakers and L1-Korean speakers. As
predicted, both definiteness and specificity had significant
effects on article (mis)use, and article errors were largely
confined to the contexts of specific indefinites and
non-specific definites, as predicted. Since Russian and
Korean both lack articles but are typologically very
different, Ionin et al. concluded that the results could
not be attributed to L1-transfer. Rather, they argued,
the patterns of article (mis)use supported the view that
L2-English learners have access to semantic universals,
through Universal Grammar. Ionin et al.’s findings have
since been to some degree replicated with speakers of
other article-less L1s, such as Japanese (Hawkins et al.,
2006) and Mandarin Chinese (Trenkic, 2008; but see
section 1.3 for discussion of Trenkic’s interpretation of
the findings), further strengthening the conclusion that
specificity effects with L2-learners from article-less L1s
are not a result of L1-transfer. In contrast, L1-transfer
effects have been found for L2-English learners coming
from L1s with articles, such as Spanish (Ionin et al., 2008)
and Greek (Hawkins et al., 2006).
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1.2 New cross-linguistic evidence
Ionin et al.’s (2004) view of L2-English article use was
closely tied to a particular view of article distribution
in natural language: they argued that a language which
has only two articles uses these two articles to encode
either the definiteness distinction (as in English) or
the specificity distinction (as in Samoan).3 Furthermore,
they proposed that a language like Samoan makes the
specificity distinction with both definites and indefinites,
resulting in the pattern in Table 1. This proposal was
supported by Samoan data from Mosel and Hovdhaugen
(1992).
However, as acknowledged at the time by Ionin et al.
(2004), the available data from Samoan were quite limited,
and at best suggestive, not conclusive. Ionin et al.’s
proposal has since then led to two papers independently
investigating the nature of specificity marking in Samoan
in more detail. Fuli (2007) and Tryzna (2009) have both
shown convincingly that Samoan marks the specificity
distinction with indefinites but not with definites, contrary
to what the Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992) data, cited by
Ionin et al. (2004), had suggested. This is illustrated in
(8) and (9), from Fuli (2007). As shown in (8), specific
indefinites are marked with le ((8a), where the speaker
has a particular movie in mind), whereas non-specific
indefinites are marked with se ((8b), where the speaker
has no particular movie in mind).4
(8) a. [−definite, +specific]: le
Ou te fia matamata i le ata –
I TAM want watch LD SP.SG movie
‘ae ‘ua leai se avanoa.
but TAM no NSP.SG space
“I want to see a movie – but there is no space
(or: it’s sold out).”
b. [−definite, −specific]: se
Ou te fia matamata i se ata –
I TAM want watch LD NSP.SG movie
ae le’i mautinoa po’o le a le ata
but not know Q:which SP.SG.ART movie.
“I want to see a movie – but I don’t know which
movie.”
3 Ionin (2006) further discusses what happens in a language which has
three articles, such as colloquial English, with the, a, and referential
this. Ionin (2006) shows that three-article languages use one article
with all definites, another article with specific indefinites, and a third
article (or no article) with non-specific indefinites. The discussion in
the present paper does not affect Ionin’s (2006) account of three-article
languages, only that of two-article languages.
4 The abbreviations used in the glosses of the Samoan examples in (8)
and (9) are as follows (from Fuli 2007): ART = Article, LD = Locative
directional particle, NSP = Non-specific, PRES = Presentative particle,
SG = Singular, SP = Specific, Q = Question, TAM = Tense Aspect
Marker.
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
Table 3. Article grouping cross-linguistically: two-article languages (revised).
In contrast, definites are always marked with le, as
shown in (9), which is based on a famous English
example from Donnellan (1966). Donnellan argued that
the sentence Smith’s murderer is insane is ambiguous
between two readings: a referential (specific) reading, on
which the speaker intends to refer to a particular person
(e.g., Jones), such that Jones is the murderer of Smith and
Jones is insane; and an attributive (non-specific) reading,
on which the speaker states that whoever murdered Smith
is insane. If Samoan made a specificity distinction with
definites, we would expect le to be used on the specific
reading of the murderer of Smith, and se on the non-
specific reading. However, Fuli (2007) shows that this is
not the case: le is obligatorily used with definites, as in
(9a), regardless of whether the speaker has a particular
individual in mind. Use of se in (9b), like use of a in a
murderer of Smith, has the pragmatically odd implication
that Smith had multiple murderers.
(9) a. [+definite]: le
O le tagata na fasiotia Simiti
PRES SP.SG.ART person TAM kill Smith
e leaga le ulu.
TAM bad SP.SG.ART head
“The person who murdered Smith is insane.”
b. [+definite]: se is inappropriate
O #se tagata na fasiotia Simiti
PRES NSP.SG.ART person TAM kill Smith
e leaga le ulu.
TAM bad SP.SG.ART head
“#A person who murdered Smith is insane.”
The correct representation of article distribution in
English vs. Samoan thus appears to be that in Table 3:
the only context type in which English and Samoan differ
is [−definite, +specific]. Thus, Samoan joins a number
of other languages that morphologically mark specificity
with indefinites only, such as Modern Hebrew (Givón,
1981, 2001) and Sissala (Blass, 1990) (see Lyons, 1999;
Ionin, 2006, for more discussion).5 While languages such
5 It is furthermore not clear whether the specificity distinction made
with Samoan indefinites corresponds to SPECIFICITY AS SPEAKER INTENT
TO REFER as defined in (1b). Fuli (2007) argues that the distinction
between le and se corresponds more closely to the distinction between
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341
as colloquial/spoken English, Modern Hebrew and Sissala
use different morphemes to mark definites (the in English,
ha in Hebrew, ná in Sissala) and specific indefinites
(indefinite this in English, xad in Hebrew, nέ in Sissala),
Samoan, as we saw above, marks definites and specific
indefinites with the same morpheme, le.
Samoan is not alone in this: there is much cross-
linguistic evidence outside the article system of languages
marking definite and specific indefinite DPs in the same
way. One example is the Spanish dative preposition
a, which marks direct objects which are definite or
specific indefinite as well as animate (see Torrego, 1998;
Aissen, 2003; Leonetti, 2004). Another is accusative-Case
marking in Turkish, which similarly applies to definites
and specific indefinites, but not to non-specific indefinites
(see Enç, 1991; Kelepir, 2001). The issues surrounding
both the Spanish a and the Turkish accusative-Case
marking are quite complex (see the references cited above
for detailed discussion), not least because it is not always
clear what type of specificity is under discussion: for
instance, Enç (1991) proposes that Turkish accusative
Case-marked specific indefinites are partitive, denoting
members of a previously mentioned set; however, Kelepir
(2001) shows that wide-scope indefinites which are not
partitive may also bear accusative Case-marking (see also
Ko, Ionin and Wexler, 2006, for the relevance of partitivity
to L2-acquisition).
Another example, which is perhaps more straightfor-
ward than the Spanish and Turkish cases, is that of the
initial vowel in the Bantu language of Luganda. Ferrari-
Bridgers (2004) shows that the initial vowel is used with
nominals that are referential, but not with those that are
non-referential. Referentiality here is used as a term that
unites definites and specific indefinites.
Thus, there is cross-linguistic evidence that languages
may mark definites and specific indefinites in the same
wide and narrow scope (as in (8), where a movie takes wide vs. narrow
scope with respect to want). Fuli also acknowledges that se is used with
wide-scope indefinites when the identity of the referent is unimportant,
but argues that this occurs only in particular registers, and not in
regular speech. More investigation into this issue is required. Even if
Samoan does not use le for “specificity as speaker intent to refer”, there
is clear evidence that many other languages do: English indefinite this
(as in (3)) is a case in point; another example is the Hebrew xad
(Givón, 1981, 2001). See Ionin (2006) for more discussion.
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 342 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
way (see also Lyons, 1999, for more cross-linguistic data).
This suggests that there is a core property that definites and
specific indefinites have in common, despite the semantic
differences between these concepts. One candidate for
such a core property is the semantic type of individual. At
least on some analyses of definites (such as the Fregean
analysis adopted here), definites have the semantic type
of individual (see Heim, 1991): a definite determiner such
as the applies to a property (e.g., the property denoted by
student) and returns an individual (e.g., the unique referent
of the student).6 On the view of specificity discussed
in this paper (see Ionin, 2006, for more discussion),
specific DPs are similarly individual-denoting: a specific
indefinite DP such as this one student (with this used as a
specific indefinite marker in colloquial English) denotes
a specific individual that the speaker has in mind. In
contrast, indefinites which do not bear specificity marking,
such as a student, are typically treated as quantificational
(Heim, 1991) or cardinal (Diesing, 1992), but crucially
not individual-denoting.
Thus, it is possible that languages such as Samoan
and Luganda, which use the same marker for definites
and specific indefinites, are using that marker to encode
individual-denoting (as opposed to quantificational) DPs.7
1.3 Implications for L2-acquisition
In light of the new data on Samoan, discussed above,
we can no longer claim that L2-English learners who
overuse a with definites and overuse the with indefinites
are adopting the “Samoan” option. While overuse of the
with specific indefinites in L2-English is consistent with
natural language data, overuse of a with non-specific
definites does not appear to have natural language parallels
(see Lyons, 1999). Yet Ionin et al. (2004, 2008) found that
adult L2-English learners from article-less L1s made both
types of errors. At the same time, in Ionin et al. (2008), we
6 An anonymous reviewer notes that not all cases of DPs with
definite articles cross-linguistically are individual-denoting, citing in
particular the existence of non-individual-denoting definites in certain
contexts in Romance languages (cf. Kupisch and Koops, 2006). While
examining different types of definites cross-linguistically is beyond
the scope of the present paper, we note that all definites included in our
test instrument (as well as in that of Ionin et al., 2004), such as those
in (4) and (5), are compatible with the Fregean analysis of definites as
individual-denoting.
7 The issue is probably more complicated in Spanish and Turkish:
Spanish a-marking and Turkish accusative marking have been shown
to apply to certain quantifiers as well as to definites and specific
indefinites (see the papers cited above for the complexity of the
issues involved). This suggests that the marking does not (or at least
does not always) directly encode the semantic type of individual
(since quantifier phrases do not denote individuals). Whatever the
case with quantifiers, the fact remains that Spanish and Turkish have
morphology that separates definites and specific indefinites from non-
specific indefinites, with the semantic type of the DP quite possibly at
the heart of this separation.
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found that specificity effects with indefinites were stronger
than specificity effects with definites, for L1-Russian L2-
English learners, at both individual and group levels.
In Ionin et al. (2008), we had no explanation to offer for
why some learners would make the specificity distinction
with indefinites only. Now, in light of the new Samoan
data, we have such an explanation: L2-English learners
who make the specificity distinction only (or primarily)
with indefinites are following natural language patterns, as
indicated in Table 3. However, the question is now turned
on its head: why do other L2-English learners make the
specificity distinction with both definites and indefinites,
given that this does not appear to be an option available
to natural language?
One possible answer would be to say that L2-English
learners’ errors have nothing to do with options available
to natural languages: learners’ patterns of article use are
traceable to explicit strategies, rather than to semantic
universals. A proposal along these lines is put forth
by Trenkic (2008), who questions Ionin et al.’s (2004)
view that specificity can be morphologically encoded
with definites as well as indefinites in natural language;
as we saw above, the new data available from Samoan
lend support to Trenkic’s critique. Trenkic puts forth
an alternative proposal, on which L2-English learners’
article misuse is due not to the linguistic universal of
specificity, but rather to an explicit strategy linking the and
a to the presence vs. absence, respectively, of “explicitly
stated knowledge”. We will discuss Trenkic’s proposal
in detail in section 4.1, and provide a response to it in
section 4.2. But first, before considering why adult L2-
English learners use articles the way they do, we discuss
relevant data from children acquiring English articles.
2. Acquisition of articles by children vs. adults
The study of how articles are acquired is certainly
not restricted to the study of adult learners. There has
been much work investigating articles in monolingual
first language acquisition (Brown, 1973; Maratsos, 1976;
Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Schaeffer and Matthewson, 2005,
among many others), and, more recently, articles in
bilingual first language acquisition (Serratrice, 2000;
Kupisch, 2006) and child second language acquisition
(Dirdal, 2005; Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008).
2.1 Articles in monolingual and bilingual language
acquisition
Interestingly, many studies of child acquisition of
English report overuse of the in indefinite contexts – a
phenomenon that, as discussed in the previous section,
has also been attested in adult L2-acquisition. In the case
of child L1-acquisition, Brown (1973) reports overuse
of the in naturalistic production data of very young
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
(2–3-year-old) children, while Warden (1976), Maratsos
(1977) and Schaeffer and Matthewson (2005), among
others, found overuse of the in elicitation experiments
(as did Karmiloff-Smith, 1979, for overuse of definite
articles in child French). In these studies, overuse of the
was largely confined to contexts where the child could in
principle have a specific referent in mind. For example,
the two-year-olds in Schaeffer and Matthewson’s study
would say “Mickey Mouse drew the house” to a listener
who had no previous familiarity with this house.
Studies of bilingual early language development have
similarly found some overuse of the definite article
with specific referents in naturalistic data. For instance,
Kupisch (2006), studying an Italian–German bilingual
child (as well as a German–French child) longitudinally,
found some cases of overuse of definite articles with
specific referents in Italian, but not in German (it should
be noted that the child on the whole used articles more in
Italian than in German). Serratrice (2000) found potential
errors of definite article overuse in an Italian–English
bilingual child.8
When very young children make errors of article
use, a standard explanation is that they lack relevant
pragmatic knowledge: Maratsos (1976), for instance,
argued following Piaget that young children are egocentric
and ignore hearer knowledge. Schaeffer and Matthewson
(2005) proposed, in a similar vein, that children have
difficulty separating speaker and hearer assumptions. The
same explanation has been used for young bilingual
children’s overuse of the (Serratrice, 2000; Kupisch,
2006). On the other hand, some researchers (Matthewson,
Bryant and Roeper, 2001; Wexler, 2003) have proposed
linguistic rather than psychological accounts of the
overuse by young children.
2.2 Articles in child L2-acquisition
A recent study that has examined articles among child L2-
English learners in some detail is Zdorenko and Paradis
(2008), which followed 17 L2-English children from
several different L1s over the period of two years (mean
ages 5;4 at the start, and 7;4 at the end of the study), using
an oral elicitation task with picture books.
Zdorenko and Paradis argued that all the noun phrases
produced by the children in this task were [+specific]:
the children were describing individuals and objects
visually present in the pictures, so the speaker (the child)
always had a specific referent in mind. The pictures were
8 It should be noted that studies of articles in naturalistic child speech
typically find lower percentages of the overuse than experimental
elicitation studies. However, given that in naturalistic speech, the
experimenter does not have control over the relevant contexts (e.g.,
whether they are specific or non-specific), it is difficult to compare
naturalistic and experimental data directly.
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343
not visible to the experimenter, and the children were
reminded that the experimenter could not see the pictures.
Therefore, use of the upon the first mention of the noun
was coded as infelicitous, as in the example in (10),
while use of the upon second mention was coded as
felicitous. Errors of the overuse such as those in (10) were
considered to be errors with specific indefinites, since the
child was intending to refer to a particular elephant or ball
(EXP = experimenter, CHI = child).
(10) Incorrect the in indefinite context
∗
EXP: how do you start?
∗
CHI: # mm # the elephant throw the ball.
(JHHN 5;11)
(should be: an elephant and a ball)
(Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008, p. 238)
Interestingly, Zdorenko and Paradis found overuse
of the with indefinites for children from both article-
less L1s and L1s which have articles (only children
from article-less L1s exhibited article omission). As
children’s exposure to English increased, rates of the
overuse with indefinites decreased, for both L1-groups,
from 40–50% error rate in session 1 to 10–30% error
rate in session 5. Overuse of a with definites, in contrast,
was practically non-existent, in both L1-groups, from the
earliest sessions.
Zdorenko and Paradis interpreted their findings as
providing support for Ionin et al.’s (2004) Fluctuation
Hypothesis, and as evidence that for L2-English
children, fluctuation overrides transfer: even children
from L1s which have articles were showing the
overuse with indefinites. In contrast, Ionin et al. (2008)
found that transfer overrides fluctuation for adult L2-
English learners: L1-Spanish L2-English learners were
uninfluenced by specificity in their article use.
Zdorenko and Paradis did not consider the possibility
that the children’s errors of article misuse could stem from
age-related egocentricity: that the children focused on the
individual in the pictures and did not consider whether the
experimenter was equally familiar with the pictures. This
explanation can be fully ruled out only if age-matched
native English-speaking children performed the same task
and did not overuse the with indefinites. Unfortunately,
Zdorenko and Paradis did not include such a control
group in their study. However, relevant evidence can be
found in Warden (1976), who used a similar picture-based
elicitation test with L1-English children ages 3–9, as well
as native English adults. Overuse of the with first-mention
referents was 54% for the 3-year-olds, down to 38%-39%
for 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds, 18% for 9-year-olds, and
0% for adults (Warden, 1976, p. 109, Experiment III).
Note that the L2-English children in Zdorenko and
Paradis’s (2008) study were between 5 and 7 years old
during the first testing session, and that their rates of the
overuse are fairly similar to, perhaps just a little higher
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 344 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
than, rates of the overuse among the 5- and 7-year-old
native English children in Warden (1976). Thus, it is
possible that the L2-English children as well as the native
English children were being egocentric, ignoring the state
of the listener’s knowledge. Alternatively, it is possible
that both the L2-English children and the native English
children were influenced by linguistic factors, optionally
using the to mark specificity.
2.3 Motivation for the present study
To sum up, we have two unresolved issues when we
consider article (mis)use across different populations.
First, the error of the overuse with indefinites, in the
presence of a specific referent, can in principle be
explained equally well by a psychological explanation
(egocentricity, ignoring hearer assumptions) and a
linguistic explanation (an association of the with
specificity). While the psychological explanation is
applicable to children (at least those below six or seven),
it is not applicable to adults; the linguistic explanation, in
contrast, is in principle applicable to all populations.
Second, we know that adult L2-English learners
overuse a with non-specific definites, but that children do
not. As discussed in section 1.3 above, this error appears
to lack parallels in natural language, and thus cannot be
easily accounted for via a linguistic explanation. Note that
a overuse, unlike the overuse, also cannot be explained
through egocentricity. The absence of a overuse errors
in child (L1- and L2-)acquisition may indicate that this
error in fact is never made by children. Alternatively,
it could simply point to a difference in methodology
between studies with children vs. adults: while adults were
tested using highly controlled written elicitation tasks,
studies with children rely on naturalistic or elicited oral
production data, where [−specific] definite contexts may
simply be non-existent.
The goal of the present paper is to resolve these
issues, by examining article use in [+specific] indefinite
and [−specific] definite contexts by both child and adult
L2-English learners, with the L1 held constant. Our
ultimate aim is to tease apart three different explanations
of article misuse: egocentricity, an association of the
with specificity, and explicit strategies. Given previous
findings on L1-acquisition (Maratsos, 1976; Warden,
1976; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979), we can say that the
egocentricity explanation is applicable to children age
four or five, and possibly those as old as seven or eight,
but definitely not those older than nine. In contrast,
the specificity explanation is in principle applicable to
learners of all ages, depending on one’s view of UG-
availability in L2-acquisition. And the explicit strategies
explanation is applicable to adults and possibly older
children, i.e., learners with sufficient cognitive maturity
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and metalinguistic ability to make conscious decisions
about article use.
In light of these considerations, we see two distinct
possibilities for how article (mis)use might play out across
different populations. The first possibility is that there is
no effect of specificity in developing grammar, contrary
to what Ionin et al. (2004, 2008) proposed. Young L1-
English and L2-English children (below age 8 or 9)
overuse the as a result of egocentricity, while adult L2-
English learners are governed by explicit, non-UG-based
strategies, which lead to both overuse of the and overuse
of a. Importantly, child L2-English learners past the age
of 9 should no longer be egocentric; at the same time,
such older children may, like adult learners, make use of
explicit strategies. These strategies, in turn, should lead to
both overuse of the with indefinites and overuse of a with
definites.9
An alternative possibility is that specificity does play
a role in developing grammar, and that marking the
specificity distinction with indefinites is an option made
available to L2-learners by UG. If we assume, along
with many other L2-researchers (Schwartz, 2003, 2004;
Unsworth, 2005, among others) that child L2-acquisition
is UG-constrained, then we expect child L2-English
learners to overuse the with indefinites but not to overuse
a with definites. Importantly, we expect to find such a
pattern in child L2-English learners past the age of nine,
to whom the egocentricity explanation does not apply. If
in fact we find that (non-egocentric) L2-English children
overuse the but not a, while adult L2-English learners
overuse both articles, this would point to an important
difference between the two populations, and suggest that
explicit strategies play more of a role in adult than in child
L2-acquisition.
Thus, in order to tease apart three different explanations
for article misuse – egocentricity, specificity, and explicit
strategies – it is absolutely crucial to test child L2-English
learners, and to do so using the same methodology as
has been used with adult L2-English learners, namely
the written elicitation tasks used in Ionin et al. (2004,
2008). We therefore focus on child L2-learners between
the ages of 10 and 12: old enough to complete a written
test, old enough not to be influenced by egocentricity, yet
still young enough to be clearly child and not adolescent
or adult learners.
We leave open at present the issue of whether child L1-
learners (monolingual or bilingual) resemble (child and/or
adult) L2-learners in their article errors. In section 5, we
will come back to this issue and discuss the implications
9 In principle, one could argue that adult and child L2-learners use
different strategies, and that adults’ strategies lead to both the and
a misuse, whereas children’s strategies lead only to the misuse.
However, this proposal is entirely unmotivated, and as such will not
be considered here.
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
that our findings have for theories of article (mis)use in
first language acquisition.
3. The study
Our study was designed to answer the following research
questions:
(11) a. Do child and adult L2-English learners from an
article-less L1 make the same error of the overuse
with specific indefinites?
b. Do child and adult L2-English learners from the
same article-less L1 make the same error of a
overuse with non-specific definites?
We investigated these research questions by comparing
child and adult L1-Russian L2-English learners. Russian
was chosen as the L1 to test because it was one of the L1s
of learners tested by Ionin et al. (2003, 2004).
3.1 Tasks
All of the participants, L2-learners as well as native-
speaker controls, took a written elicitation test of English
article use; additionally, all of the adult L2-learners took a
cloze test of L2-proficiency (the details of this test, which
was created by William Rutherford, can be found in Ionin
et al., 2008). Child participants did not take the cloze test,
which was deemed to be too difficult for children.10
The elicitation test consisted of 60 short dialogues,
each designed to elicit a particular target word. This task
was modeled after elicitation tests used by Ionin et al.
(2003, 2004), but with two important changes. First,
while the previous studies’ tests gave the participants a
choice of target words (e.g., the and a), the present task
contained a blank in the target sentence; the participants
were instructed to fill in the blank with any word they
considered appropriate for the context (including a dash
if no word was necessary). Second, unlike the previous
tests, the present test included fillers targeting items other
than articles.
Of particular relevance for us are 24 target items
which elicited articles in the four singular contexts
given in Table 2, six items per category: [+definite,
+specific], [+definite, −specific], [−definite, +specific]
and [−definite, −specific]. The [+definite] and [−definite]
items were designed to elicit the and a, respectively, from
native English speakers. Examples of the four categories
can be found in (4)–(7) above. In the actual test, the target
article was replaced by a blank.
10 Additionally, some of the participants completed an oral task, and
there were some differences in the type of oral task administered to
different participants. However, these differences did not affect the
written elicitation task reported here, which was identical for all the
participants.
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345
In addition to the 24 target items, the test contained
12 other items testing article use in other contexts (not
reported here) and 24 fillers. The fillers targeted function
words other than articles, such as prepositions, pronouns,
and auxiliaries; a few filler items also had a “dash” (i.e., no
word) as a possible target response. Most filler items were
compatible with more than one response; performance of
adult native English speakers was taken as indicative in
deciding which responses were appropriate.
Performance on fillers was used as a cut-off:
participants had to give an appropriate response to at
least two thirds of the fillers (16 out of 24) in order to
be included in the final analysis. In this way, we could
be certain that learners knew English well enough to
understand the test dialogues; participants who performed
poorly on fillers were deemed to either have serious
difficulties with the vocabulary and grammar of the test,
or else to be unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the
test format (this was particularly an issue for the child
participants, who were not as used as adults to taking
standardized tests). Either way, test difficulties would
potentially obscure the learners’ performance on the target
items.
3.2 Participants
The L2-participants were adult and child Russian speakers
living in Orel, Russia, and learning English at school.
We tested 26 adults, all but one of whom were university
students studying English in the classroom (the remaining
learner had previously studied English at university and
now used it at work), and 58 children between the
ages of 10 and 12, all of whom were studying English
at school (see section 2.3 above on the importance of
using this age range). Forty-three of the children attended
specialized English schools, where English instruction
began in second grade (age 7 or 8), and where English
lessons took place every day of the week. Fifteen of
the children attended regular schools, where English was
taught only starting in fourth grade (age 9 or 10), and only
two days a week.
As described in the previous section, participants had
to meet a cut-off in their performance on filler items in
order to be included in the final analysis. Twenty-one of
the 26 adult L2-learners met this cut-off, but only 18 of
the 58 children did, all of them from specialized schools.
The test was clearly too difficult for all of the children
from regular schools as well as many of the children from
specialized schools; in addition to failing to meet the cut-
off, these children performed quite randomly on the test
items. Of the 18 children who did meet the cut-off, 15
were from the same specialized school, which may have
had more rigorous English instruction. Of the 18 children,
16 were in fifth grade at the time of testing, and two were
in sixth grade.
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 346 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
Table 4. Background of L2-learners included in the data analysis.
Adult L2-learners (N = 21)
Mean
Age at testing (in years) 20
Age of first exposure to English (in years) 8.9
Length of exposure to English (in years) 11
Cloze test score (maximum = 120) 21
Table 4 reports the background information on those
adult and child L2-learners who met the cut-off and were
included in the data analysis. The two populations were
fairly uniform in terms of their length of exposure to
English, with the adults having had more exposure, on
average, than the children.
In terms of age of first exposure, we divided the
participants into two groups: the “early exposure” group
were those participants who began studying English at
age 8 or earlier, in preschool or elementary school; the
“late exposure” group were those participants who began
studying English at age 9 or later, in middle school or
high school. Schwartz (2004) argues that true child L2-
learners are those whose exposure to the target language
began before age 8, and this age has been used as a cut-
off in much subsequent literature on child L2-acquisition
(e.g., Unsworth, 2005; Song and Schwartz, 2009).11 Given
this classification, all 18 child L2-learners included in
the analysis were early-exposure learners (and hence true
child L2-learners). As for the adults, nine were early-
exposure learners and 12 were late-exposure learners; we
will come back to this distinction within the adult group
in section 3.3.
The control groups consisted of 12 native English
adults and 11 native English children (12 native English
children were tested originally, but one failed to meet the
cut-off). The mean age of the adult controls was 22.7
(standard deviation 1.1, range 19–31), and the mean age
of the child controls was 10 (standard deviation 0.27,
range 9–12). The native English adults and children were
thus roughly matched with the L2-English adult and child
11 Schwartz (2004) does not make a distinction as to whether the first
exposure should be naturalistic (children immersed in the target
language) or classroom-based (children studying a foreign language
in their home country). In fact, a recent study by Song and Schwartz
(2009) looks at L1-English children acquiring L2-Korean in the
classroom, in an English-speaking environment. Thus, our testing
of child L2-learners in a classroom setting is quite in line with other
research in L2-acquisition. We would have liked to also test a group of
L1-Russian child learners of English in the U.S., but unfortunately,
due to the greatly diminished immigration from Russia in recent
years, we were unable to find enough such subjects for a meaningful
analysis.
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Child L2-learners (N = 18)
Standard Standard
deviation Range Mean deviation Range
1 18–22 11 0.58 10–12
2.4 5–14 5.8 1.3 3–8
2.2 6–15 5.1 0.32 5–6
9.5 6–44 n/a n/a n/a
groups in terms of age (four additional adult native English
participants were excluded from analysis due to being
much older, in their 40s and 50s). Of the 11 native English
children, three were in fourth grade, six were in fifth grade,
and two were in sixth grade, at the time of the testing.
3.3 Group results
Throughout this section, we report the results of native
English speakers (adults + children) separately from the
results of the L2-English learners (adults + children).
We do not combine the two groups because our research
question is not concerned with differences between native
speakers and L2-English speakers (which are expected,
given the nature of L2-acquisition). Our research question,
rather, is concerned with the patterns within the L2-
English group, and with child–adult differences in
particular. For comparison, we report the results of the
native English group.
The figures in this section report the means and
standard deviations of the and a use for each test category.
We also report separate statistical analyses for use of
the vs. use of a, following the practice in Ionin et al.
(2004). Our rationale for this is as follows. Each test item
could potentially receive one of four responses: the, a,
“no article”, or “other” (such as some, a demonstrative,
a possessive pronoun, etc.). Given that our predictions
concern both the use and misuse, and a use and misuse,
we need to examine the effects that definiteness and
specificity had on both article types.
Native English speakers
Figures 1 and 2 compare the and a uses, respectively,
among adult and child native English speakers. As
the figures show, the adults were near ceiling in their
performance. The children were less accurate, but most
of their errors were constrained to the category of non-
specific indefinites, and even there the error rate was
only 14%. A repeated-measures ANOVA was run on the
group of native English speakers, with definiteness and
specificity as the within-subjects variable, and age group
(adult vs. child) as the between-subjects variable. Separate
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles 347

+def, +spec
6.00 +def, -spec
-def, +spec
-def, -spec

5.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00

adult child

Error bars: +/- 1.00 SD

Figure 1. Mean use of the by category and age group (native English speakers).

+def, +spec
+def, -spec
6.00 -def, +spec
-def, -spec

5.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00

adult child

Error bars: +/- 1.00 SD

Figure 2. Mean use of a by category and age group (native English speakers).

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 348 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
Table 5. Results of repeated-measures ANOVAs for native English speakers
(N = 23: 12 adults and 11 children).
Factor
Definiteness
Definiteness × age group
Specificity
Specificity × age group
Definiteness × specificity
Definiteness × specificity × age group
Age group
∗∗∗
p < .001; ∗∗ p < .01; ∗ p < .05
ANOVAs were conducted on use of the vs. use of a. The
results are given in Table 5.
As Table 5 shows, definiteness had a highly significant
effect on both the and a suppliance, as expected, and
specificity had no effect. The only significant interaction
was between definiteness and age group. This was due to
the adults making a stronger distinction between definites
and indefinites than did the children – the adults were
generally more accurate in their article use. Age group
did not otherwise have any significant effect.
L2-English learners: overall accuracy
Before proceeding to a discussion of how definiteness
and specificity influenced L2-English children and adults,
we first consider the extent to which these two groups
are comparable in their overall article use. On the one
hand, there is much literature suggesting that children
outperform adults when other factors (such as length
of exposure) are held constant. On the other hand, the
children in our study had on average less exposure to
English than did adults; given that both children and adults
are studying English in a classroom EFL context, it is quite
possible that the adults, with more classroom exposure
than the children, would perform better.
In order to assess these issues, we first computed overall
accuracy scores for both groups, an “absolute accuracy”
score and a “relative accuracy” score, using the formulas
in (12). As an illustration, consider adult learner A2, who
supplied an article in 20 of the 24 items (the other 4 items
received a “no article” or “other” response), and who
was furthermore correct on 14 of those 20 articles (using
the with definites and a with indefinites), but exhibited
article misuse on the other 6. The learner’s absolute
accuracy score would be 14/24 = 58%, whereas this
learner’s relative accuracy score would be 14/20 = 70%.
(12) a. absolute accuracy score = # of learner’s correct
article uses (the with definites and a with
indefinites) / total number of test items (N = 24)
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Use of the Use of a
F(1,21) = 1152∗∗∗ F(1,21) = 1124∗∗∗
F(1,21) = 8.53∗∗ F(1,21) = 6.71∗
F(1,21) = 1.27 F(1,21) = 0.323
F(1,21) = 1.27 F(1,21) = 2.10
F(1,21) = 3.16 F(1,21) = 0.323
F(1,21) = 3.16 F(1,21) = 2.10
F(1,21) = 0.33 F(1,21) = 3.35
b. relative accuracy score = # of learner’s correct
article uses (the with definites and a with
indefinites) / total number of items in which the
learner supplied an article
The mean accuracy scores for the adult group were
72% absolute accuracy and 78% relative accuracy; for the
child group, the scores were 76% absolute accuracy and
81% relative accuracy. The children and adults did not
differ from each other significantly on either accuracy
score (t(1,37) = .95, p = .38 and t(1,37) = .83, p = .43,
respectively; equal variances not assumed). Thus, even
though the adults had on average more exposure to
English, they did not outperform the children.
In order to find out how overall accuracy was influenced
by individual differences between subjects, we computed
bivariate correlations between the two accuracy scores
and the following factors: age at the time of testing; age of
first exposure to English (as self-reported by the subjects);
length of exposure to English (calculated by subtracting
age of first exposure from age at testing); and the cloze
test proficiency score, for adult subjects only. The only
variable among these that correlated significantly with
article accuracy was age of first exposure to English,
which had a significant inverse correlation both with
the absolute accuracy score (r = −.43, p < .01) and the
relative accuracy score (r = −.32, p < .05). Thus, as
age of exposure to English increased, overall accuracy
decreased, consistent with what we know about the
advantages of early exposure. Importantly, age at the time
of testing did not correlate at all with either accuracy score
(r = −.10, p = .55 and r = −.06, p = .71, respectively).
This shows that being a child or an adult at the time
of the study did not significantly affect the learner’s
accuracy.
Given that the two groups were not significantly
different from one another in overall accuracy, we can
now examine whether the PATTERNS exhibited by these
two groups are also similar.
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles 349

Table 6. Results of repeated-measures ANOVAs for L2-English learners

(N = 39: 21 adults and 18 children).

Factor Use of the Use of a

Definiteness F(1,37) = 230∗∗∗ F(1,37) = 233∗∗∗

Definiteness × age group F(1,37) = 0.24 F(1,37) = 1.01
Specificity F(1,37) = 17.9∗∗∗ F(1,37) = 33.94∗∗∗
Specificity × age group F(1,37) = 0.28 F(1,37) = 3.17
Definiteness × specificity F(1,37) = 9.88∗∗ F(1,37) = 3.87†
Definiteness × specificity × age group F(1,37) = 1.28 F(1,37) = 4.60∗
Age group F(1,37) = 1.20 F(1,37) = 0.38

∗∗∗
p < .001; ∗∗ p < .01; ∗ p < .05; † p = .057 (marginal)

+def, +spec
6.00 +def, -spec
-def, +spec
-def, -spec

5.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00

adult child

Error bars: +/- 1.00 SD

Figure 3. Mean use of the by category and age group (L2-English learners).

L2-English learners: effects of definiteness
and specificity
Figures 3 and 4 compare the child and adult L2-English
learners on use of the vs. use of a, respectively. As the
large standard deviations show, there was much variation
among individual L2-learners – a point that we will come
back to in section 3.4.
A repeated-measures ANOVA was run on the L2-
English group, with definiteness and specificity as within-
subjects variables, and age group (adult vs. child) as
the between-subjects variable. Separate ANOVAs were
conducted on use of the vs. use of a. The results are given
in Table 6.
As Table 6 shows, both definiteness and specificity
had highly significant effects, regardless of whether the
or a was measured. At the same time, the interaction
between definiteness and specificity was significant when
use of the was measured and marginal when use of a was

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 350 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
6.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00
1.00
0.00
adult
Error bars: +/- 1.00 SD
Figure 4. Mean use of a by category and age group (L2-English learners).
measured. These interactions were due to the fact that
the specificity distinction was stronger with indefinites
than with definites: specific and non-specific indefinites
differed more from each other with respect to the overuse
(and hence correct a use) than specific and non-specific
definites differed from each other with respect to a overuse
(and hence correct the use). Furthermore, when use of a
was measured, there was a significant interaction between
definiteness, specificity, and age group. This was due to
the fact that the “definiteness by specificity” interaction
existed for the child group only: adults made the same
specificity distinction for definites and indefinites on use
of a, while children made a much greater distinction with
indefinites than with definites. To put it more simply,
children exhibited much overuse of the with specific
indefinites, but little in the way of a overuse with non-
specific definites. Adults, by contrast, made both kinds of
errors.
3.4 Individual results
In order to determine how the specificity distinction
played out with definites and indefinites for individual
participants, we classified the adult and child L2-learners
into different patterns.
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+def, +spec
+def, -spec
-def, +spec
-def, -spec
child
The classification procedure was as follows. We
considered only errors, overuse of a with definites and
overuse of the with indefinites, since these are true
indications of article misuse. Given the fairly low rate of
article omission or use of “other” responses, correct use
of the and a with definites and indefinites, respectively,
is nearly a mirror image of article misuse for most
participants. We then computed the number of specificity-
related errors for both indefinites and definites, using the
formulas in (13).
(13) a. Specificity distinction with indefinites
# of specificity-related errors on indefinites =
# of the uses with specific indefinites – # of the
uses with non-specific indefinites
b. Specificity distinction with definites
# of specificity-related errors on definites =
# of a uses with non-specific definites – # of a
uses with specific definites
Next, we classified learners into five patterns based on
how their specificity distinction with definites compared
to that with indefinites. These patterns are described in
(14). Three of the patterns were for learners who exhibited
fluctuation on at least one category (see (14a)) and two
IP address: 137.110.4.125
 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
of the patterns were for learners who did not exhibit
fluctuation (see (14b)).12
(14) a. Fluctuation patterns: at least 3 errors of article
misuse, and at least 2 of them related to
specificity13
PATTERN 1: SPECIFICITY DISTINCTION WITH
DEFINITES ONLY/MOSTLY
at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, and
specificity distinction with definites exceeds
specificity distinction with indefinites by 2 or
more tokens (2 vs. 0, 3 vs. 1, etc.)
PATTERN 2: SPECIFICITY DISTINCTION WITH
INDEFINITES ONLY/MOSTLY
at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, and
specificity distinction with indefinites exceeds
specificity distinction with definites by 2 or more
tokens (2 vs. 0, 3 vs. 1, etc.)
PATTERN 3: FLUCTUATION
at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, and
specificity distinction exists with both definites
and indefinites, and the two distinctions are either
equal (1 vs. 1, 2 vs. 2, etc.) or differ by 1 token
only (2 vs. 1, 3 vs. 2, etc.)
12 Three participants were not included in any of these five patterns due
to exhibiting completely unexpected article use: an adult participant
who overused the with non-specific indefinites more than with
specific indefinites (two-token difference); a child participant who
overused a with specific definites more than with non-specific
definites (two-token difference); and an adult participant who
overused a with more than half (four out of six) of specific definites
(no other participant made more than three errors on the category of
specific definites, or on the category of non-specific indefinites, and
the majority of participants made at most one or two errors in these
categories – i.e., categories where no article misuse is predicted).
These three participants’ behavior is entirely unpredicted and does
not fall into any possible pattern. Note that there were only three such
participants out of 39 participants total, so the results are probably
noise, due to poor understanding of the test.
13 We acknowledge that any cut-off is necessarily arbitrary, and provide
some motivation for our chosen cut-off below. Given the existence
of 6 tokens in each category, the total possible number of specificity-
related errors is 12 (maximum 6 specificity-related errors with
indefinites, maximum 6 specificity-related errors with definites). Few
participants made more than 3 or 4 specificity-related errors. We set
2 specificity-related errors as a cut-off because 2 errors are less likely
than 1 error to be due to noise; on the other hand, setting the cut-off
above 2 would have resulted in too many participants being classified
as target-like.
We note that Pattern 1 includes some learners who made a
specificity distinction with definites (2 or more) as well as a small
reverse (−1) distinction with indefinites – i.e., a greater overuse
of the with non-specific than with specific indefinites. Similarly,
Pattern 2 includes some learners who made a specificity distinction
with indefinites (2 or more) and a small reverse (−1) distinction
with definites. Since these “reverse specificity” distinctions had the
magnitude of only 1 token, they are considered noise. Participants
who made a reverse distinction which had the magnitude of 2 or more
tokens were not included in any pattern, as described in the previous
footnote.
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351
b. Non-fluctuation patterns: fewer than 2
specificity-related errors
PATTERN 4: NO FLUCTUATION
at least 3 errors of article misuse overall, but no
more than 1 of them is related to specificity – i.e.,
errors are distributed across different categories
PATTERN 5: TARGET-LIKE
2 or fewer errors of article misuse, regardless of
where they occur
Figure 5 shows the number of subjects falling into each
of the five patterns in the adult vs. child L2-groups. Figure
5 points to a striking difference between children and
adults: the single most frequent pattern for adults is Pattern
3 – fluctuation with both definites and indefinites – while
the single most frequent pattern for children is Pattern 2 –
fluctuation with indefinites only. Additionally, a greater
proportion of children than of adults is target-like
(Pattern 5) or otherwise uninfluenced by specificity
(Pattern 4), although members of both groups are
represented in both patterns. Pattern 1 (fluctuation with
definites only) is the least frequent pattern in the data, and
it is exhibited primarily by adults.
Finally, we consider the role that age of first exposure
has on the patterns of article (mis)use. We already saw, in
section 3.3, that earlier age of exposure (for both children
and adults) correlates significantly with performance. We
next ask whether the patterns of individual article (mis)use
were different for the nine adult L2-learners with early
first exposure (age 8 or younger) vs. the 12 adults with
late first exposure (age 9 or older). (Recall that all of
the children had early first exposure.) We found that
the single adult subject who patterned with the children,
in making the specificity distinction with indefinites
only (Pattern 2), had early exposure, like the children.
However, three other early-exposure adults patterned with
five of the late-exposure adults in making the specificity
distinction across the board (Pattern 3), while one early-
exposure adult patterned with three late-exposure adults
in showing fluctuation with definites only (Pattern 1). The
“no fluctuation” patterns (4 and 5) were exhibited by four
early-exposure and two late-exposure adults. In light of
these findings, we cannot reach any definitive conclusion
about the role of age of exposure on performance.
4. Discussion
In this study, we found the following patterns. First, we saw
that child L1-Russian L2-English learners, like adult L1-
Russian L2-English learners, are influenced by specificity
in their patterns of article (mis)use. At the same time,
however, we saw that adult L2-learners exhibit specificity
effects with both definites and indefinites, whereas child
L2-learners exhibit specificity effects with indefinites to a
much greater degree than with definites. At the individual
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 352 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
8 type
0
1.specificity 2. specificity
distinction w/ distinction w/
definites only indefinites only
Figure 5. Number of L2-learners in individual patterns.
level, most adult subject who were non-targetlike made the
specificity distinction with both definites and indefinites,
and a few did so with definites only, while most of the
children who were non-target-like made the specificity
distinction with indefinites only (see Figure 5).
As discussed in section 1.2, many natural languages
make the specificity distinction with indefinites, whereas
(in light of new data from Samoan) no language appears
to make a specificity distinction with definites. The L2-
English children are thus within the bounds of what is
possible in natural language: they appear to (optionally)
use the to mark the semantic type of individual, and hence
to mark both definites and specific indefinites. Note that
the egocentricity explanation, discussed in section 2.2,
cannot apply to the L2-English children in our study,
who are between 10 and 12 years of age. Importantly, the
control group of age-matched native English children did
not exhibit any effects of specificity. Since egocentricity
is related to cognitive maturity, and hence to age, if
egocentricity were still influencing article use in 10-year-
old children, we would expect it to influence both native
English and L2-English children. The clear differences
between the two groups provide evidence in favor of a
linguistic explanation of L2-English children’s data.
The adult L2-English learners, on the other hand,
follow a different pattern, making errors of a overuse with
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adult
child
3. fluctuation 4. no 5. target-like
fluctuation
definites as well as the overuse with indefinites – the same
pattern that has been found for adult L2-English learners
in earlier studies (Ionin et al., 2004, 2008; Trenkic, 2008).
Since this pattern is not consistent with natural language,
what is it due to? In the rest of this section, we address
this question.
4.1 Trenkic (2008): strategies underlying L2-English
article use
As discussed in section 1.3, Trenkic (2008) proposed
that adult L2-English learners’ errors of the overuse
and a overuse are not related to the semantic
universal of specificity, but rather arise from an explicit
strategy. Trenkic (2008) takes issue with Ionin et al.’s
operationalization of specificity as “explicitly stated
knowledge”: in items designed as [+specific], like those
in (4) and (6) above, there is an explicit statement of
the speaker’s familiarity with the referent, while in items
designed as [−specific], like those in (5) and (7) above,
such familiarity is explicitly denied. According to Trenkic,
the fact that L2-English article use is influenced by
EXPLICITLY STATED KNOWLEDGE (ESK) does not show that
the semantic universal of specificity is in fact at work,
since specificity as “speaker intent to refer” is not the
same concept as ESK.
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
In light of this critique, Trenkic provides an
alternative explanation, namely that L2-English learners
are misanalyzing the and a as adjectives, and assigning to
them the meanings of “identifiable” and “unidentifiable”,
respectively. When the discourse contains a statement of
ESK, as in (4) and (6), learners consider the referent to
be identifiable, and use the. When the discourse does not
contain a statement of ESK, as in (5) and (7), learners
consider the referent to be unidentifiable, and use a. Thus,
the pattern of article misuse found by Ionin et al. is
accounted for without an appeal to semantic universals.
In order to further support this proposal, Trenkic
replicated the study of Ionin et al. (2004) with L1-
Mandarin learners of English in the UK, adding two new
categories to the categories in (4)–(7). These categories,
exemplified in (15) and (16), are argued to be [+specific],
because the speaker is intending to refer to a particular
individual, but [−ESK], because the speaker is denying
knowledge of this individual.
(15) [−definite] [+specific, −ESK]: The speaker has a
specific referent in mind, but she explicitly denies
that she knows the identity of the person being talked
about.
Office gossip
Gina: . . . and what about the others?
Mary: Well, Dave is single, Paul is happily married,
and Peter . . . he is engaged to a merchant
banker, but none of us knows who she is,
or what she’s like.
(16) [+definite], [+specific, −ESK]: The speaker has a
specific referent in mind, but she explicitly denies
that she knows the identity of the person being talked
about.
Paul: Will Bob join us for lunch?
Sheila: No, he’s very busy. He is meeting with the
director of his company. I don’t know who
that person is, but he will decide whether
Bob gets his promotion or not.
Trenkic found that (15) and (16) were treated by
learners just like the [−specific] categories in (5) and
(7), and not like the [+specific] categories in (4) and (6).
Trenkic concluded that L2-English learners are influenced
by ESK rather than by specificity, and that the source of
article errors is a misanalysis of determiners as adjectives,
rather than access to semantic universals.
4.2 A response to Trenkic: against articles as
adjectives
Trenkic is quite right to point out that specificity has
been operationalized as ESK in our studies. However,
we disagree with Trenkic’s proposal that articles in
L2-English are misanalyzed as adjectives. Below, we
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353
discuss three reasons for our disagreement: (i) evidence
that operationalization of specificity as ESK is in fact
warranted by natural language data; (ii) evidence that L2-
English learners pay attention to specificity, rather than
ESK, in deciding which articles to use; and (iii) lack of
support for Trenkic’s proposal that articles are adjectival
in L2-English.
Specificity as ESK: evidence from natural
language data
We argue, contra Trenkic (2008), that the operational-
ization of specificity as ESK is supported by specificity
marking with indefinites in natural language. Ionin (2003,
2006) showed that native English speakers find use of the
specific indefinite marker this more felicitous precisely
in those contexts where a statement of ESK provides
an indication that the speaker considers the referent
NOTEWORTHY. Furthermore, Ionin (2006) showed that
native English speakers’ judgments of the acceptability
of indefinite this coincides with L2-English learners’
overuse of the with indefinites. In a small pilot study,
native English speakers were provided with the indefinite
contexts from an elicitation test administered to L2-
English learners (the test whose results are reported in
Ionin et al., 2004), and asked to rate the acceptability
of specific indefinite this in each context. As reported in
Ionin (2006), native English speakers rated indefinite this
significantly higher in those indefinite contexts set up as
[+specific] than as those set up as [−specific]. This finding
suggests that the operationalization of specificity as ESK
influenced not just L2-English learners’ judgments, but
those of the native English speakers as well.
Evidence from L2-English learners’ self-reports
There is also independent evidence that L2-English
learners are influenced by specificity rather than ESK
in their article use. This evidence comes from Yang
and Ionin (2009), who partially replicated Trenkic’s
(2008) study with adult L1-Mandarin speakers learning
English in China. Like Trenkic, Yang and Ionin compared
performance on contexts such as (15) and (16) to contexts
such as (4)–(7), and like Trenkic, they found that use of
the was greater in [+ESK] than in [−ESK] contexts. To
supplement these findings, Yang and Ionin also asked their
subjects to provide the reason for their response, in written
form.14 They then classified these reasons into several
different types, including “uniqueness”, “specificity”, and
14 The method was partially based on that of Butler (2002), who also
elicited L2-English learners’ reasons for article (mis)use. However,
while Butler conducted an interview asking for the learners’ reasons
AFTER the learners had completed the article elicitation test, Yang
and Ionin asked learners to supply the reasons DURING the test. Thus,
Yang and Ionin’s study provides more direct information about what
learners think as they are taking a test of articles.
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 354 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
“ESK”. An example of a subject’s response falling into
the “specificity” category was “Because the speaker has
a particular reference [sic] in mind”, while an example
of an “ESK” response was “Because the speaker said
that he doesn’t know the person”. Specificity was by far
the most frequent reason given by the L2-learners for
their article choice, accounting for 69% of the overall
responses, while ESK was given as a reason only 9% of
the time (Yang and Ionin, 2009). Even when the context
was set up as [−definite, +specific, −ESK], L2-learners
overused the (nearly as often as in the [+ESK] variant)
and explained their overuse by the presence of a particular
referent in 73% of the instances; and conversely, when the
context was set up as [+definite, +specific, −ESK], L2-
learners overused a and explained this by the absence of a
particular referent in 62% of the instances. The statement
or denial of ESK did not appear to be the determining
factor in learners’ article misuse, contrary to Trenkic’s
claims.
Lack of evidence for the adjectival nature of articles
Finally, a problem with Trenkic’s proposal is that
it rests on the assumption that L2-English learners
from article-less L1s misanalyze English determiners as
adjectives. Given the typological variety of languages
(Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Japanese) whose
speakers have been found to exhibit specificity effects
in L2-English, it is unlikely that every single one of
these languages treats determiners as adjectival. Trenkic
(2004, 2007), citing Corver (1992), Zlatić (1997), and
Bošković (2005), among others, makes a persuasive
case for the adjectival nature of Serbian determiners.
A case can also be made for the adjectival nature
of determiners in Russian, another Slavic language, in
which determiners share morphological and syntactic
properties with adjectives (but see Pereltsvaig, 2007, for
arguments that the Determiner functional category exists
in Russian). Importantly, however, Trenkic provides no
evidence that determiners in Mandarin Chinese – the
L1 under investigation in her 2008 paper – or, for that
matter, Korean or Japanese, are adjectival. She simply
assumes that this is the case, stating (p. 12) that “It goes
without saying that Mandarin, Russian and Korean would
all have ways of signalling the identifiability of referents in
discourse (all languages do), and that they would differ in
how they achieve this. But all that matters for the present
discussion is that none of them has articles . . . For our own
proposal, it means that they all are assumed not to have
the syntactic category determiner in their L1.”
We believe that this assumption is quite controversial:
first of all, it has not been convincingly shown that all
article-less L1s have adjectival determiners; second, there
is little or no direct evidence that speakers of article-less
L1s really do consider the and a to be adjectives. The
only evidence comes from Trenkic (2007), who found
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that L1-Serbian L2-English learners omitted articles more
with adjectivally modified nouns than with unmodified
nouns (e.g., the same learner might correctly say the
forest but also say dark forest without an article). Trenkic
(2007) proposed that L2-learners have limited attentional
resources, and therefore produce only one adjective at
a time: treating articles as adjectives, they drop them
when a more informative adjective (such as dark) is
required by the context. Even assuming that the empirical
findings of article drop can be generalized to other L1-
groups, such as Russian and Mandarin Chinese, it is far
from clear that they provide support for articles being
adjectival in nature. Trenkic’s explanation in terms of
attentional resources works perfectly well without the
further stipulation that learners treat articles as adjectival:
when learners’ attentional resources are taken up with the
retrieval of a noun (forest) and an adjective (dark), learners
fail to retrieve functional elements, such as articles.
Even if they have correctly analyzed articles as being
determiners – rather than adjectives – limited attentional
resources could still cause article drop.
4.3 Semantic universals and strategies in adult
L2-English
The findings with adult and child L2-English learners
present a conundrum. On the one hand, overuse of the with
indefinites in L2-English is exhibited by both children
and adults, is tied to the semantic universal of specificity,
and finds parallels in natural language (notably, in native
speakers’ judgments of specific indefinite this). On the
other hand, overuse of a with definites is exhibited by adult
learners only, and finds no natural language parallels.
One way to solve this conundrum would be to say
that adult L2-English learners employ explicit strategies
in their article use, and are not influenced by the
semantic universals of definiteness and specificity. Child
L2-English learners, on the other hand, do access
semantic universals, making the specificity distinction
with indefinites only, much as natural languages do.
This explanation faces a number of difficulties,
however. First of all, the same phenomenon – overuse of
the with specific indefinites, in the same contexts – is given
different explanations depending on whether it occurs
among children or among adults. Second, this explanation
fails to capture the similarities between overuse of the in
adult L2-English and specificity marking with indefinites
cross-linguistically. And finally, it leaves open the question
of why learners should adopt the particular strategy that
they do; as discussed in the previous section, the particular
strategy-based explanation proposed by Trenkic (2008) is
problematic, in that it makes unwarranted assumptions
about learners’ misanalysis of determiners as adjectives.
We put forth an alternative proposal, which combines
domain-specific linguistic knowledge and explicit
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 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
strategies. Access to semantic universals, namely definite-
ness and specificity, constitutes domain-specific linguistic
knowledge, which we argue is available to both child and
adult L2-learners. At the same time, however, learners may
formulate explicit strategies for how articles are used; we
argue that adult learners are more likely to do so than child
learners.
When child L2-learners respond to the elicitation task
in our study, they use their domain-specific linguistic
knowledge directly, attending both to definiteness and to
specificity in the discourse context: they pay attention
both to whether uniqueness has been established (use the
with definites) and to whether the speaker has a specific
referent in mind (use the with specific indefinites). In
contrast, adult L2-learners formulate an explicit strategy
based on specificity, along the lines of “use the when the
speaker has a particular referent in mind, use a when the
speaker does not have a particular referent in mind” – i.e.,
precisely the strategy verbalized by the learners in Yang
and Ionin’s (2009) study.
Adult learners, then, use contextual cues, such as
the presence or absence of ESK, to deduce whether the
speaker has a particular referent in mind: for instance, in
(6), where the speaker describes a particular girl (stating
her name, etc.), the learner deduces from the context that
the speaker has a particular referent in mind, and therefore
overuses the. In contrast, in (5), where the speaker denies
all knowledge of who the principal is, the learner decides
that the speaker does not have a particular referent in
mind, and therefore overuses a. In this way, this explicit
strategy overextends the specificity distinction to definites
as well as indefinites, and results in overuse of the with
specific indefinites as well as overuse of a with non-
specific definites. Thus, we agree with Trenkic (2008)
that adult L2-learners employ an explicit strategy in their
article use, paying attention to the presence or absence
of ESK in the context. However, where we disagree with
Trenkic is in the source of this strategy: we argue that
this strategy is based on learners’ underlying sensitivity
to specificity.
In indefinite contexts, domain-specific sensitivity to
specificity and the explicit strategy of “use the with a
particular referent” have the same result: overuse of the
in indefinite contexts involving ESK. While ESK is by no
means equivalent to specificity, it is a way of indicating
specificity even for native English speakers, as discussed
in section 4.2. Thus, whether a learner is paying attention
to inherent specificity, or using an overt specificity-based
strategy, the learner will pay attention to the presence or
absence of ESK.
In definite contexts, on the other hand, a difference
emerges. On the one hand, domain-specific linguistic
knowledge tells learners that the specificity distinction is
applicable to indefinite contexts only: definiteness (the
presupposition of uniqueness) must always be marked
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355
with the, regardless of whether the speaker has a particular
referent in mind. The explicit strategy of “use the with a
particular referent”, on the other hand, has a reverse side to
it, namely “use a when there isn’t a particular referent” –
i.e., when the lack of ESK makes clear that the speaker has
no particular referent in mind. While (most) child learners
make use of domain-specific linguistic knowledge, and
hence do not make a specificity distinction with definites,
(most) adult learners are guided by explicit strategies,
and therefore overextend the specificity distinction to
definites.
In order to understand the difference between child and
adult performance more fully, we now turn to a discussion
of explicit and implicit knowledge.
4.4 Explicit and implicit knowledge
Studies of second language acquisition have long
been concerned about the distinction between more
implicit, integrated and automatized knowledge, and
more explicit, metalinguistic knowledge. In the generative
framework, implicit knowledge corresponds to domain-
specific linguistic knowledge provided to the learner
by Universal Grammar, and hence to true linguistic
competence (e.g., Gregg, 1989). Native speakers are, by
definition, competent in their native language, possessing
implicit knowledge; the acquisition of a second language
entails the acquisition of implicit knowledge (Ellis,
2005). However, L2-learners also possess much explicit
knowledge about the language, in the form of explicitly
learned rules, memorized constructions, metalinguistic
knowledge, etc. See Ellis (2005) for an overview of the
debate concerning the relationship between explicit and
implicit knowledge.
A particular point of interest has been the extent to
which particular experimental tasks tap into implicit vs.
explicit knowledge (Birdsong, 1989; Ellis, 2005, among
others). Ellis (2005) argues that more implicit tasks (such
as oral narration and timed grammaticality judgments)
are those that involve time pressure and/or focus on
meaning, while more explicit tasks (such as untimed
grammaticality judgments) focus on form and do not
involve time pressure. Furthermore, learners are likely
to be aware of what rules are being tested only in the more
explicit tasks.
We believe that the distinctions between explicit and
implicit knowledge, and between explicit and implicit
tasks, are quite relevant for our data. As discussed above,
we propose that learners have both explicit and implicit
knowledge about articles: the implicit, domain-specific
knowledge takes the form of access to semantic universals,
while the explicit knowledge takes the form of an explicit
strategy which overextends the semantic distinction to
definites as well as indefinites. Evidence that adult learners
do in fact have both types of knowledge available to them
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 356 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
comes from two sources: adult learners’ performance on
a more implicit task, and differences among adult learners
in different studies.
Evidence from an implicit task
The adult L1-Russian and L1-Korean L2-English learners
whose results are reported by Ionin et al. (2004) took
a written narrative task as well as an article elicitation
task. The written narrative task asked learners to write
short narratives about important events and objects in their
lives, and did not explicitly target articles. According to
Ellis’s (2005) criteria, discussed above, this task would be
classified as implicit: it targeted meaning rather than form,
and didn’t encourage conscious awareness of linguistic
rules. In contrast, the article elicitation tasks used in Ionin
et al. (2004) as well as in the present study would be
classified as explicit, like other fill-in-the-blank or forced
choice tasks.
Interestingly, the finding of the overuse with specific
indefinites was supported by the more implicit written
narrative production task, while overuse of a with non-
specific definites was not. In the narration task, L1-
Russian L2-English learners overused the with 28% of
specific indefinites, compared to only 4% of non-specific
indefinites, and L1-Korean speakers similarly overused
the with 13% of specific indefinites, compared to only 2%
of non-specific indefinites.15 At the same time, overuse
of a with singular definites was relatively low for both
groups: 1% for L1-Russian speakers, and 6% for L1-
Korean speakers; it was furthermore not clear whether
this overuse of a was tied to non-specificity.
These data on definites may be interpreted in two ways.
One possibility is that learners do not morphologically
mark non-specificity on definites in narrative production:
learners use the with definites regardless of whether
specificity has been established, i.e., they do essentially
what natural languages do. The other possibility is that
nearly all definite DPs which are found in narratives are
[+specific], which means that the occasion for a overuse
does not even arise. Depending on which of these two
possibilities is correct, we either find evidence that L2-
English learners do NOT make a specificity distinction
with definites (the strong view), or we find NO evidence
that learners DO make such a distinction (the weak view).
In contrast, we find compelling evidence that learners
do make a specificity distinction with indefinites in
production data. Overuse of the with specific indefinites
is clearly not an artifact of the elicitation task format,
while overuse of a with non-specific definites may be
15 These numbers are calculated from Ionin et al. (2004), Table 26.
We report here only the results for singular DPs, since this is where
both the and a might be used. See Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2007)
for evidence that the overuse also occurred with specific indefinite
plurals.
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such an artifact. We suggest that the explicit nature of the
elicitation task leads adult learners to formulate an explicit
strategy which overextends the specificity distinction to
definites; in contrast, in a more implicit task, narrative
production, adult learners make the specificity distinction
with indefinites only, and are therefore more consistent
with cross-linguistic data.
A comparison across studies
Importantly, we would argue that the overextension of
the specificity distinction to definites is not a necessary
feature of every adult learner’s article misuse – and
conversely, that not every child learner makes the
specificity distinction with indefinites only. In our present
study, we did find two children who showed the “adult”
pattern, making the specificity distinction with indefinites
as well as definites, and we similarly found one adult
who showed the “child” pattern, making the specificity
distinction with indefinites only.
Nor is this one adult so unusual: if we look across
multiple studies testing specificity effects on article choice
in adult L2-English, we find that specificity effects often
tend to be greater with indefinites than with definites.
For example, Ionin et al. (2004) found that, in a forced-
choice elicitation test, adult L1-Korean learners of English
made a greater specificity distinction with indefinites
than with definites while adult L1-Russian speakers made
specificity distinctions of similar magnitude with both
indefinites and definites. Since the two groups took the
same test, this could not be an effect of task type. Nor
could it be an effect of the native language: Ionin et al.
(2008) found greater specificity effects with indefinites
than with definites in a group of L1-Russian learners of
English, using the same task that we used in our present
study.
Factors that may, to some extent, relate to the
differences across subject populations, are exposure and
proficiency. In the Ionin et al. (2004) study, the Korean
speakers had more intensive exposure to English than
the Russian speakers: the Korean speakers were living
in an English-speaking environment as well as studying
English intensively, whereas the Russian speakers came
from various walks of life, and often did not have very
intensive exposure to English. Possibly as a result of this
increased exposure, the Korean speakers had, on average,
a significantly greater proficiency in English (as measured
by the Michigan test of L2-proficiency) than did the
Russian speakers.
Similarly, if we compare the adult L1-Russian
population tested by Ionin et al. (2008) to the one in
the present study, we find that the former had both more
exposure to English (by virtue of living in the U.S.,
rather than in Russia) and greater English proficiency (as
measured by a cloze test). While most adult subjects in
the present study had low proficiency, and not a single
IP address: 137.110.4.125
 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
subject was advanced, the subjects tested by Ionin et al.
(2008) were distributed across three different proficiency
levels (low, intermediate and advanced).
Thus, it is possible that adult L2-learners with
greater proficiency and/or greater immersion in the
target language are more likely to make the specificity
distinction with indefinites only, whereas learners with
lower proficiency and/or less immersion are more likely
to make the specificity distinctions with both indefinites
and definites. These are fairly weak tendencies, and
exceptions can be found with individual learners across
studies. In contrast, the child L2-learners in the present
study showed a strong tendency to make the specificity
distinction with indefinites only, even though the children
were not immersed in English, were studying it only in the
classroom, and in fact had less exposure than the adults
in the same study.16
Explicit vs. implicit knowledge, and the role of age
To sum up the above discussion, we can make the
following generalizations: (A) child L2-learners are
more likely than adult L2-learners to be guided by
domain-specific linguistic knowledge, and thus make
the specificity distinction with indefinites, but not with
definites; in contrast, (B) adult L2-learners make use
of an explicit strategy, overextending the specificity
distinction to definites, when responding to an explicit
elicitation task; yet (C) if we look at a more implicit
written narrative task, we find evidence that adult L2-
learners are also guided by domain-specific knowledge
of specificity; and furthermore, (D) some adult L2-
learners (generally those with greater proficiency and/or
greater exposure to the target language) show evidence of
being guided by domain-specific mechanisms, rather than
explicit strategies, even in an explicit elicitation task.
We argue that children, even ones studying the target
language in a classroom setting, are less likely than adults
to formulate explicit strategies, and more likely to be
guided by domain-specific linguistic knowledge. It is well-
known that explicit knowledge about language is acquired
by children later than implicit knowledge: for instance,
children under the age of five have not yet acquired
metalinguistic awareness (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, 1979).
16 One could argue that the children included in our data analysis
were pre-selected for high proficiency, given that the majority of
the children tested had to be excluded due to not passing the filler
cut-off. Crucially, those excluded children did NOT pattern with the
adults in this study in making the specificity distinction with both
indefinites and definites. Rather, the children who did not meet the
filler cut-off exhibited fairly random behavior on the test items, which
suggested that the test was simply too difficult for them to complete.
The children who were able to understand the test – as evidenced by
their ability to pass the filler cut-off – were not necessarily of very
high proficiency. In fact, their overall accuracy was no different from
that of the adults in this study, as discussed in section 3.3.
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357
While the children in our study are certainly old enough
to have explicit linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge,
we argue that they still make less use of such knowledge
than do adults, and are more guided by domain-specific
linguistic knowledge.
However, we are not arguing for a qualitative
distinction between how children and adults learn
language, as proposed under the Fundamental Difference
Hypothesis of Bley-Vroman (1989, 1990). We saw
that some children do appear to rely more on explicit
strategies, while some adults rely more on domain-specific
knowledge. We are not in a position to state exactly what
individual differences (of exposure, proficiency, etc.) are
responsible for a given subject’s behavior.
Note that while there is much literature arguing
that explicit knowledge can, through practice, become
implicit knowledge (cf. the STRONG INTERFACE position –
Sharwood Smith, 1981; DeKeyser, 1998, among others),
we are in a sense proposing the opposite: that explicit
knowledge is actually based on implicit knowledge. We
argue that learners come to the language-learning task
equipped with domain-specific knowledge, but that, at
least in the case of adult learners, they also make use
of explicit strategies. However, these strategies do not
come out of thin air, but are based on learners’ intuitive
understanding of what languages are like – in our case,
of what distinctions articles can in principle mark. The
domain-specific knowledge of how articles work is still
there, in the learners’ minds, but this knowledge is not
accessed in an explicit task, being instead overridden by an
explicit strategy that the learner has formulated. However,
when the task is made more implicit, the domain-
specific knowledge may come to the fore; furthermore, we
reported suggestive evidence that learners immersed in the
target language to a greater extent, and/or learners with
greater L2-proficiency, may abandon explicit strategies
altogether and rely on implicit knowledge.
5. Conclusion
We began this paper by asking whether children and adults
from an article-less L1 (Russian) exhibit similar patterns
in their acquisition of English articles. We found that the
answer is both yes and no: on the one hand, both adult
and child L2-learners are sensitive to specificity in the
discourse context; on the other hand, adults overextended
the specificity distinction to definites as well as indefinites,
while children made the specificity distinction with
indefinites only, thus paralleling natural language data
more closely. We have argued that this difference is
due to the role that strategies play in language-learning:
while (most) child L2-learners are guided by domain-
specific mechanisms, (at least some) adult L2-learners
formulate explicit strategies, which, however, are based
on the underlying sensitivity to specificity. Evidence
IP address: 137.110.4.125
 358 T. Ionin, M. L. Zubizarreta and V. Philippov
from narrative production data (Ionin et al., 2004, 2007)
further suggests that this explicit strategy is active only in
an explicit elicitation task, and not in a more implicit
narrative task. We argue that there is no qualitative
difference between adult and child L2-learners, because
some adults (possibly those with more intensive exposure
to English) do appear to rely more on domain-specific
knowledge than on explicit strategies, and hence make
the specificity distinction with indefinites only. And of
course, we should not forget that some L2-learners in our
study, children as well as adults, are entirely target-like
in their article use. These learners have apparently settled
on definiteness, rather than specificity, as the semantic
universal underlying English article choice (see Ionin
et al., 2008, for a discussion of how the input may lead
learners to this decision).
We are now in a position to pinpoint the role that age
plays in the acquisition of English articles: namely, that
older learners are more likely to let explicit strategies
override domain-specific linguistic knowledge. Note that
what appears to matter here is age at the time of testing,
NOT age of exposure. Many of the adult L2-learners in
this study, as well as in our previous studies, were first
exposed to English as children; however, they still used
explicit strategies to a greater extent than the child L2-
learners in this study. Note further that both child and adult
L2-learners in the present study were learning English in
a classroom setting, and were not immersed in the target
language; in a sense, the adults in the present study are the
children in the present study eight years from now (barring
these children’s move to an English-speaking country).
Thus, we would actually expect that the children tested in
the present study would use explicit strategies to a greater
extent if they are tested again in about eight years.
Finally, we come back to the issue of first language
acquisition. In this paper, we have argued that child L2-
English learners make use of domain-specific knowledge,
which involves accessing the semantic universals of
definiteness and specificity. Clearly, the same domain-
specific knowledge should be available to the first
language learners. If using the to mark specificity is part of
the acquisition of English articles, then we would expect
child L1-learners, like child L2-learners, to exhibit the
overuse with specific indefinites. In fact, as discussed in
section 2.1, there is ample evidence that young English-
acquiring children do overuse the with specific reference;
in contrast, overuse of a is not attested in L1-acquisition,
consistent with what we saw in the case of child L2-
acquisition – both in our work with 10–12-year-old L2-
learners, and the work of Zdorenko and Paradis (2008)
with 5–7-year-old L2-learners.
As discussed earlier, errors of the overuse with specific
reference may be given an egocentricity explanation.
While this explanation appears quite appropriate for three-
year-olds, it becomes less plausible for six-year-olds and
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is entirely implausible for 10-year-olds. Thus, we are left
with two possibilities. Either overuse of the among very
young children is due to egocentricity, while overuse of
the with older children is due to domain-specific linguistic
knowledge; or the linguistic explanation applies to both
populations. The latter possibility is more parsimonious,
as it allows us to advance the same explanation for what
appears to be same phenomenon in different populations.
However, until children of various ages and in different
learning situations are tested using the same methodology,
we cannot be entirely certain that in fact we are dealing
with the same phenomenon across populations. We have to
remember that overuse of the among young monolingual
children is typically found in naturalistic production (e.g.,
Brown, 1973) or in oral elicitation tasks involving visual
referents (e.g., Warden, 1976; Schaeffer and Matthewson,
2005). Overuse of the in the presence of a visual referent
was found among children as old as seven or eight –
both L2-learners (Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008) and native
speakers (Warden, 1976). In contrast, our study involved a
written elicitation task with no visual referents, and found
overuse of the among 10–12-year-old child L2-English
learners, but not among age-matched L1-English children.
Thus, reviewing the studies so far, age and the presence
of a visual referent appear to be confounded. It is an open
question as to whether six-year-old L1-English children
would overuse the in the absence of a visual referent,
and conversely, whether 10-year-old L2-English learners
would have increased overuse of the in the presence of
a visual referent. Until children of a variety of ages are
tested with several different methodologies, we cannot
know for certain whether we are dealing with a single
phenomenon or different phenomena (overuse of the tied
to visual salience vs. overuse of the tied to the linguistic
concept of specificity).
At the same time, the child L2-data discussed in the
present paper close an important gap: all previous studies
of article acquisition focused either on young children or
on adults, while our study presents data from somewhat
older, pre-adolescent children. We now know that overuse
of the with indefinites is attested across a variety of ages,
and are in a position to explore the reasons behind this
overuse further.
Yet another fruitful direction for future study is the
testing of different populations, children as well as adults,
using a variety of methodologies. If in fact adult L2-
learners are influenced both by implicit, domain-specific
knowledge and by explicit strategies, we would expect that
different tasks would be able to tap more into one type of
knowledge vs. the other. We already saw an indication of
this in the comparison of narrative production data and
elicitation test data with adults. Testing both adult and
child learners using a variety of both oral and written tasks
would shed further light on the types of knowledge that
learners possess. This is true in all grammatical areas, not
IP address: 137.110.4.125
 Child and adult learners’ L2-acquisition of articles
only articles, as shown by studies such as Ellis (2005). In
fact, recent work by Montrul, Foote and Perpiñán (2008)
found that adult L2-Spanish learners perform differently
on explicit vs. implicit tasks testing the same aspects
of Spanish grammar, and that furthermore L2-Spanish
learners pattern differently from heritage speakers of
Spanish.
In the present paper, we have suggested that even in a
fairly explicit task, children do not make use of explicit
strategies to the same extent as adults. This provides a
possible answer to how children and adults differ in their
language-learning abilities. We hope that further work
will be able shed more light on exactly how children and
adults make use of explicit and implicit knowledge in their
language development.
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Received: October 3, 2007
Final revision received: May 21, 2008
Accepted: July 12, 2008
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