The Processing of Specificity in the English Article System by Korean Learners of English

Abstract

This paper investigated the role of specificity by Korean learners in processing the article choice parameter. To this end, Korean learners of EFL completed the online and the offline semantic acceptability-rating tasks. The online results indicated that the Korean learners of EFL at both the advanced and the intermediate level of the proficiency fluctuated between the specificity and definiteness parameter settings. Especially for the intermediate Korean learners of EFL, the response time of the [-definite, +specific] condition showed little difference from other conditions, implying that they adhered to the definiteness parameter setting. The offline results, in contrast, indicated that the Korean learners of EFL at both the advanced and the intermediate level of the proficiency adhered to the definiteness parameter setting. It seems that there is a possibility that the intermediate learners were adopting the definiteness parameter setting, which is different from the claims made in Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) specificity hypothesis.