REFERENTIAL PLACE-HOLDING IN CHINESE CHILDRENS ACQUISITION OF ENGLISHARTICLES

This longitudinal study examines the acquistion of English articles by three 6-year-old, second language learning children whose native tong ue is Chinese, a language without articles. Brown's coding scheme and an extended coding scheme were used in scoring the corpora of the chil dren's responses to a Syntax Elicitation Task. Results revealed that t he Chinese children's acquistion of the definite article differed from what had been previously found using Brown's coding scheme with Engli sh as first language learners and second language learning children of other native language origins. Chinese children's use of the definite article developed through an unmarked phase, a referential place-hold ing phase, a marked phase, and a referential substitution phase before the definite article was fully acquired. The acquisition of the indef inite article, on the other hand, was similar to the acquisition patte rn already reported for children learning English as a first language or as a second language. It is suggested that referential place-holdin g, as well as referential substitution, might not be a Chinese-specifi c second language learning phenomenon; rather, they might be derived f rom a universal referential strategy for learning articles.