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Sources of Difficulties
Research to date has yielded a variety of explanations for possible sources of L2 learner difficulties in the acquisition and uses of English articles. These sources of difficulties can be generally grouped under L1 influence, factors related to L2 learners and L2 learning processes, and L2 complexities.
L1 Influence
Following the summary by Avery and Radišić (2007), the effects of L1 influence on article acquisition can be reflected as syntactic deficit, phonological deficit, syntactic mismatch, or semantic mismatch.
Syntactic Deficit
If a language has no article system, this may result in a syntactic deficit in the acquisition of English, which has an article system. As Hawkins and Chan (1997) proposed in their Failed Functional Features hypothesis, “divergence from native-speaker representations is an effect of the inaccessibility of features of functional categories in second language acquisition” (p. 187).
According to this hypothesis, functional categories like articles that are not present in the L1 remain inaccessible to learners acquiring an L2. As a result, learners will either transfer L1 options to express semantic notions encoded in the L2 article system or develop an IL grammar for articles that is not compatible with either L1 or L2. In either case, “learners may, in fact, only adopt the surface morphophonological forms but have a syntactic representation that is incompatible with the L2” (Avery & Radišić, 2007, p. 2). Thus, Chinese L2 learners of English, whose native language lacks the category of DP, can be seen as having a syntactic deficit.
Phonological Deficit
Difficulties in the acquisition of English articles may result from a lack of similar prosodic structures in the L1. As Goad and White (2004) predicted in their Prosodic Transfer hypothesis,