L2 children do not fluctuate: Production and on-line processing of indefinite articles in Turkish-speaking child learners of English

In this study, we examined whether Turkish-speaking child L2 learners of English omitted or substituted indefinite articles in a production task that comprised a referential specific and a non-referential predicational semantic context. We also examined the source of children’s errors using a self-paced listening task where children heard grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with indefinite articles present or omitted. L2 children’s performance was compared with that of an age-matched English-speaking L1 group and a younger L1 group. Results showed that all groups distinguished between the two semantic contexts in both tasks. Although children primarily omitted articles, in the on-line processing task, all groups detected the ungrammaticality related to article omission. We interpret these results within the Missing Surface Inflection and Feature Reassembly hypotheses.