Tatiana Zdorenko’s research while affiliated with University of Alberta and other places

In this study, the authors investigate the acquisition of the article system of English as a phenomenon at the interface between morphosyntax and semantics. L1 acquisition studies have found that children make mistakes in article use until they are at least four years old or possibly older. Also, adult L2 acquisition studies have reported that learners of English often have consistent difficulty in the use of articles until very late stages of acquisition. This study sought to understand whether child L2 learners would display acquisition patterns similar to child L1 for the English article system. The authors analyzed article use in L2 children from four L1 backgrounds: Mandarin/Cantonese Chinese, Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi, Arabic, and Spanish. The findings of the study indicate that the interface domain of the article system is indeed problematic for child L2 learners. The authors found that all L1 groups had difficulty acquiring the semantic aspect of the phenomenon. In the no-article L1 groups, the acquisition of the morphosyntactic aspect of article use showed the effect of L1 in the form of article omissions. Transfer of the mapping of the feature [−definite] onto indefinite article forms from L1s did not take place in the Arabic and Spanish L1 groups, indicating that L1 transfer in child L2 acquisition is limited. Comparing the findings with those of the previous studies of child L1 and adult L2 acquisition, the authors conclude that the predominant trends in children’s article acquisition were developmental rather than transfer-based. This finding in particular highlights the special status of L2 children as a unique learner population.

This study investigated subject omission in spoken and written corpora of Russian in order to produce a quantitative comparison of omission in different genres and morphosyntactic environments. Previous theoretical studies of Russian described subject omission using isolated constructed sentences, and most corpus studies analyzed written literary language. Since subject omission in Russian is a discourse phenomenon, the present study investigated subject omission in coherent spontaneous text, focusing on spoken data from the Russian National Corpus. In the corpus, subjects were not omitted to the same extent in all genres and registers. The percentage of omitted subjects was the highest in the corpus of informal spontaneous conversations, and omitted subjects were practically absent in the written corpus, even in the most informal register. The comparison of the frequency of null subjects in different person contexts provided support for the Topicalization Hierarchy of person. More subject omission was found in the first- and second-person contexts than in the third-person contexts. In contrast, in written Russian there was no significant effect of person on the proportion of null subjects. Finally, an analysis of omitted subjects used with specific verb types was built on previous cross-linguistic studies of grammaticalized collocations such as I dunno or y'know. It was concluded that znat' 'know' and ponimat' 'understand' were likely candidates for grammaticalization as discourse markers, i.e., verbs with a particular pragmatic function that grammaticalized in a subjectless form.

The data for this study consisted of a longitudinal corpus of narra-tives from 17 English second language (L2) children, mean age of 5;4 years at the outset, with first languages (L1s) that do not have definite/indefinite articles (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and L1s that do have article systems (Spanish, Romanian and Arabic). We examined these children's acquisition of articles in order to deter-mine the role of L1 transfer and, in so doing, test the Fluctuation Hypothesis, and also to compare our findings to those from research on adult L2 learners. Three tendencies were found over two years: (1) All children substituted the for a in indefinite specific contexts (i.e. showed fluctuation) regardless of L1 background; (2) all chil-dren were more accurate with use of the in definite contexts than with a in indefinite contexts, regardless of L1 background; and (3) children with [article] L1s had more omitted articles as error forms than children with [article] L1s, but only at the early stages of acquisition. Overall, L1 influence in the children's developmen-tal patterns and rates of article acquisition was limited. Child L2 learners converged on the target system faster than prior reports have indicated for adult L2 learners, even when their L1s lack art-icles. Thus, we conclude that fluctuation is a developmental process that overrides transfer in child L2 acquisition of English articles, in contrast to what has been reported for adult L2 learners.