The acquisition of articles in English is notoriously difficult for second language (L2) learners of languages without articles. The current thesis extends this work on L2 English by investigating speakers whose L1s are Japanese and Spanish. Japanese is an article-less language, while Spanish marks definiteness and plural, like English. Specifically, the investigation tests the success of the existing hypotheses in accounting for the performance of these speakers in a series of experimental tasks. Additionally it examines whether a nominal mapping parameter proposed by Chierchia (1998), which...