In an attempt to better understand the role of L1 transfer in L2 countability judgments and article use by speakers of classifier languages, the current study investigates how Korean speakers judge noun countability in Korean as manifested in their use of the plural morphology (-tul), and whether or not their countability judgments in Korean correlate with L2 countability judgments and article choices in English. It was hypothesized that Korean learners' accuracy in L2 countability judgments and article use would be influenced by congruency of noun countability between L1 and L2 nouns. A total of 196 Korean speaking learners of English, who were divided into low-intermediate, high-intermediate and advanced levels, completed 1) a L1 countability judgment task with Korean nouns (a Korean plural marker test), 2) a L2 countability judgment task with English nouns, 3) a forced elicitation task, and 4) a translation task. In addition, 30 advanced Ukrainian learners were included as controls and completed the L2 countability judgment task and the forced-elicitation task. According to Pearson correlation and ANOVA results, the Korean learners' countability judgments in the L1 strongly correlated with their countability judgments in the L2, and L2 article accuracy on both the forced-elicitation task and the translation task was significantly affected by countability congruency between L1 and L2 nouns; English nouns whose countability of L1 counterpart nouns are congruent yielded significantly higher accuracy than incongruent English nouns. The results of the Ukrainian learners from the L2 countability judgment task and forced-elicitation task also confirmed the effects of countability congruency were L1-induced. The effects of L1 transfer at the lexical level remained strong regardless of proficiency level, noun type and task type. The results suggest that L1 transfer that arises at the lexical level affects learners' article choice in L2. A theoretical implication of the findings includes that the feature reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2008; 2009) provides more accurate account of the acquisition of English articles by speakers of classifier languages than the SLA-as-parameter-resetting approach.
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