I Want to Marry *the Merchant Banker: An Exploratory Self-Paced Reading Experiment on Arab Learners' Processing of English Articles

The SPRT results produced two key general findings. The first finding is that, as predicted, there was no statistically significant grammaticality effect between the match and mismatch conditions for both groups. In line with Ionin et al.'s (2021) findings, this research attributes the absence of this effect to the fact that match and mismatch cases can be more accurately referred to as felicitous vs. infelicitous. In other words, the use of the article is not ungrammatical in those sentences but rather infelicitous based on the context. Therefore, it is possible that participants could not detect this infelicity until the context had been established. The second general finding of this study is that the L2ers showed main effects of group and context. The fact that these learners had longer reaction times regardless of context strongly supports the assumption that L2ers exhibit longer latencies because they are processing a second language as opposed to a first language (Martin et al., 2013; Perez & Bajo, 2018).

The between-group reaction time differences in each context and the differences in the RTs of NSs and L2ers reveal some positive effects for L2ers' sensitivity to specificity. Recall that the [-definite, +specific] context most saliently highlights a specificity-over-definiteness processing preference. Therefore, showing an effect in this particular context means that the participants were sensitive to the presence of the specificity feature. As the absolute difference results in Figure 5 show, the widest difference between the two groups was observed in the [-definite, +specific] context in both regions. The NSs were faster, whereas our L2ers were significantly slower in this context. Furthermore, L2ers did not exhibit a target-like effect and had difficulty reading the correct usage of a and the incorrect usage of the in the [-definite, +specific] context; as discussed with respect to the AET results, they might be confusing specificity with definiteness due to having previously received incorrect classroom instruction. Thus, the SPRT results suggest that our L2ers' article usage performance in this context was not target-like, which suggests that their online/implicit knowledge of English articles has not yet developed. Although the descriptive results evidence this, the Tukey post hoc test results did not support learners' sensitivity to specificity in the [-definite, +specific] context. In fact, the L2ers' reaction times differed significantly from the NSs' in all four contexts. Such results may be attributed to the methodological issues we will highlight later in this section.

The results of this study challenge the existing research on learners from +ART language backgrounds (Garcia Mayo, 2009; Hawkins et al., 2006; Sarko, 2009; Snape, 2006) and support the argument Almahboob (2009), Sarko, (2009), Kim and Lakshmanan (2009), Ahn (2019), and Sabir (2018) have proposed. That is, L2ers' fluctuation in the AET and the wider gap between them and NSs in the [-definite, +specific] context suggest that the former have difficulty with this context both implicitly and explicitly. The findings support Sarko's (2009) and Sabir's (2018) claim that Hejazi Arabic seems to be structurally identical to -ART languages (with an absent D node), which is a possible explanation for why L2ers fluctuated in the [-definite, +specific] context.

This research has some limitations. First, this study used Ionin et al.'s (2004) AET experimental items, which place semantic context near the end of the dialogue. Hence, conducting the SPRT was challenging because participants are usually presented with short sentences or word pairs, not long conversations. However, it was not possible to use short sentences and individual words and maintain the semantic context. Therefore, this research only examined two regions when analysing the results, namely the noun that follows the article and the sentence-final word. Second, according to the results, the NSs and L2ers showed no significant effect for grammaticality, which may undermine the validity of the SPRT, though this finding could be attributed to the fact that “...we are now dealing with infelicity in context, rather than straightforward ungrammaticality” (Ionin et al. 2021: 140), which makes it difficult for participants to decide whether the article has been used in the correct context. Finally, the fact that the L2ers' reading times were almost double the NSs' may suggest that their reading times do not reflect implicit processing. In fact, explicit processes may very well be in play in this task. This study is meritorious despite its limitations as it is the first study to examine how Hejazi Arabic (+ART) speakers process English articles.

Conclusion and Future Directions

In conclusion, the purpose of this study was to explore whether Hejazi Arabic speakers' explicit knowledge of English articles mirrored their implicit knowledge and determine whether they transferred L1 knowledge or fluctuated when using English articles. The results of comparing L2ers' fluctuation in the AET in the [-definite, +specific] context with their performance in other contexts and with that of their NS counterparts, along with the fact that the widest difference between the two groups was observed in the [-definite, +specific] context, were interpreted as an indication that the English L2ers have not acquired the English article system implicitly and explicitly and that they process English articles, at least initially, based on specificity and not definiteness, suggesting that Hejazi Arabic's lack of an indefinite article means that it is structurally classifiable among -ART languages (with an absent D node).

We recommend that future research consider the methodological issues we have highlighted regarding designing an online task in which the semantic context is clearly marked. This topic can be pursued in several ways. One would be to examine L2 learners with varying levels of English proficiency and compare their results to determine whether a different effect is observed among advanced learners (Ionin et al., 2021; Kim & Lakshmanan, 2009). Another way would be to recruit participants that speak different varieties of Arabic to further investigate the possible presence of a specificity marker in spoken varieties. We also recommend using a different online task (such as ERPs or eye-tracking) to replicate the experiment.

Acknowledgments. I (Mona Sabir) wish to thank Dr Suhad Sonbol for the support and the valuable comments she provided and that added to the development of this manuscript. I would like to also thank Shroog Radain for helping us in collecting data. Finally, I would like to thank the students who agreed to participate in the experiment.

Ethics declarations. The ethical examination of the conducted empirical research was carried out and it was approved by Research and Ethical Committee of the English Language Institute, King Abdulaziz University. The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki (1964).

Funding. No funding was received to conduct this research.

Conflicts of Interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Author contributions. Sabir M.: the idea, modeling of the theoretical concept and general design of the research, formulation of goals and objectives of the research, general organization of empirical research, organization of the Article Elicitation Task, analysis of the task, interpretation of data of the research, writing abstracts to the article, reviewing, and editing the article, preparation of the final version of the manuscript, submission of data to the international repository. Melebari A.: organizing the Self-paced Reading Task, the selection of the software, data collection, preparation of documents and collection of informed consent from the participants of the experiment, selection of stimulus material, compliance with ethical standards of the experiment, interpretation of data of the research.

Consent for Publication. The authors jointly consent for the manuscript to be published by the journal.

Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License (CC BY 4.0).

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