This study compares the use of the Dutch definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ by three groups of learners of Dutch as an L2 with different L1 backgrounds: French, Polish and Indonesian. It was expected...Show moreThis study compares the use of the Dutch definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ by three groups of learners of Dutch as an L2 with different L1 backgrounds: French, Polish and Indonesian. It was expected that the French group would be most accurate in their article use when looked at the distinction between common gender and neuter gender contexts and was least likely to avoid definite article use by means of substitution (with an indefinite article) or omission due to positive language transfer effects. The Polish group was expected to perform less accurate than the French group only in terms of article use, not gender distinction. The Indonesian group was expected to perform less accurate than the French group on both fronts. In order to test the hypotheses a corpus study was conducted. The results did not confirm the hypotheses, no effects of language transfer were found.Show less
