A Study on Chinese Students' Acquisition of English Articles and Interlanguage Syntactic Impairment

This study investigated the resetting process of the articles' parameters by Chinese English learners with a Forced Choice Elicitation Task on the basis of the Article Choice Parameter and Fluctuation Hypothesis proposed by Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004). It was found that Chinese English learners fluctuate between definiteness and specificity, the two parameter-settings of articles. Our findings are consistent with the Fluctuation Hypothesis. Their performance can be accounted for under the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology The difficulty in article acquisition lies in the fact that Chinese English learners can not easily identify the correct features in the specification of syntactic terminal nodes as well as the vocabulary items, but they possess the syntactic knowledge and they can access the definiteness parameter setting with enough L2 input. Chinese English learners' interlanguage syntax is not impaired and UG full access is supported.