This study aims to investigate second language (L2) learnability in article acquisition from a feature-based contrastive approach by examining L1-Korean speakers’ comprehension of different types of definites in L2-English: anaphoric and non-anaphoric definites. English does not morphologically distinguish different kinds of definites but some languages do (e.g., Fering) (Schwarz, 2013). Korean, an article-less language, differentiates between the two types of definites by marking only one type (i.e., anaphoric) with the demonstrative ku ‘that’ (Chang, 2009). That is, the English definite article ‘the’ encodes [+definite, ±anaphoric] and the Korean demonstrative ‘ku’ encodes [+definite, +anaphoric]. Within the feature reassembly model (Lardiere, 2009), this difference in feature combinations between Korean and English is expected to influence L1-Korean learners’ interpretation of English articles.

An acceptability judgment task was used to assess L1-Korean L2-English learners (22 intermediate and 15 advanced) and 26 English native-speaker controls’ comprehension of different types of definites.

The intermediate group rated definites significantly higher than indefinites in anaphoric definite contexts but not in non-anaphoric definite contexts, indicating L1 influence. The advanced group rated definites higher than indefinites in non-bridging anaphoric contexts but not in bridging (anaphoric and non-anaphoric) contexts. This suggests that they have re-assembled the features associated with the definite article but have difficulty in accommodating unmentioned propositions for bridging definites.

These findings suggest that presupposition accommodation for bridging definites may be another hurdle in article acquisition beyond feature reassembly.

By focusing on the acquisition of the semantics of definites, exclusively, this study provides new data and information which enable us to come to a more precise and fine-grained understanding of learnability in article acquisition. Thus, the results of the study bring out new and insightful conceptual issues that open up new directions for future research on the acquisition of definiteness.