The acquisition of the Determiner Phrase (DP) and adjective placement in early L3 German by adult Chinese speakers of advanced L2 English

Abstract This article reports an empirical study investigating third language (L3) knowledge of German in the initial state. Adult Chinese speakers of advanced L2 English were investigated to explore the role of previously acquired linguistic knowledge in learning the structure of the German Determiner Phrase ( DP ) and the placement of adjectives. Both English and German use articles with nouns; however, unlike in German, nouns are not marked for grammatical gender in English. In contrast to English and German, an article system does not exist in Chinese. With respect to adjective placement, all three languages allow adjectives to appear attributively and predicatively, but only in German are attributive adjectives inflected for gender, number, and case. The results indicate that perceived typological similarity between the L3 and the previously acquired languages may not be a deterministic factor in L3 acquisition, contrary to Rothman’s Typological Primacy Model . Although the Chinese speakers of advanced L2 English responded to L3 German articles in definite contexts in a target-like way, their poorer performance with indefinite contexts and with attributive adjectives suggests that certain uninterpretable syntactic features not selected during primary language acquisition may cease to operate in subsequent language acquisition, supporting the Interpretability Hypothesis of Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou.