An area of considerable interest in second language (L2) acquisition is the difficulties learners face with the acquisition of articles. This article examines the role of prosody in the acquisition of articles by an endstate L2 English speaker focusing on the free morphemes the and a. In order to analyse the articles produced by a Turkish speaker named SD, we used the Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2006) phonetic analysis software to determine the prosodic shape of each article in article + noun configurations and article + adjective + noun configurations. The aim of the analysis is to see whether a more detailed analysis of the data would be fully consistent with the strong or weak interpretation of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis. The findings of our analysis show that SD produces a large percentage of stressed articles, which are non target-like. We discuss the implications of our analysis for the interlanguage representation of articles by SD as well as the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis.
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