An Empirical Study of the Conceptual Transfer Effect as Reflected in the L2 Acquisition of English Articles

Abstract

Within the framework of Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis(Jarvis,2007;2011),this paper investigates Chinese-speaking L2-English learners' computation of the uniqueness of noun phrases(NPs),which further leads to their selection of English articles in marking the target NPs.An acceptability judgment task and a written interview task were used to collect data of L2 learners' interpretation of English articles.The results reveal that the L2 learners differ from native speakers in their computation of uniqueness of target NPs and in their L2-English article choices,and this difference can be attributed to their conceptual knowledge formed in the acquisition of the mother tongue and to their processing of such knowledge.Pedagogically,this study provides an explanation of L2-English article substitution errors from the perspective of conceptual transfer.