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Japanese Speakers' ArticleOmission in L2 English: Evidence against the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis?

In recent studies by Goad & White (2004, 2006a, in press) the acquisition of articles (the/a) by second language (L2) learners of English have been investigated. They claim that L2 learners from article-less languages such as Turkish and Chinese will have difficulty in prosodically representing articles in spoken production due to first language (L1) prosodic transfer i.e. no prosodic structures available in the L1 to accommodate articles in the L2. The following study tests the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis by examining the use of articles by Japanese learners of English.