Is Starting Early Beneficial for the Acquisition of English Articles in an EFL Setting?

This study investigates the role of age of first exposure in the acquisition and processing of English articles in an EFL setting. Fifty advanced Korean learners of English participated in a grammatical acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. The participants were divided into two groups depending on the initial age at which they were constantly exposed to English at least 3 hours per week (‘early group’ < 12; ‘late group’ ≥ 12). No significant performance differences were observed between the two groups in the judgment task. However, meaningful differences were found between the reading behaviors of the two groups in the self-paced reading task. These findings show that the learners’ age of first exposure has a significant impact on learners’ performance when the ability to process English articles in real-time is evaluated. In contrast, it has much less impact on learners’ performance on a task which tests explicit knowledge under no time-limit condition.