EN
Incorrect use or omission of articles is a common phenomenon in the case of Polish-speaking learners of such languages as English and German. In the present paper I deal with this issue in the context of third language acquisition, i.e. I conduct an analysis of article errors made by Polish-speaking students of Ger-man Philology in their written assignments in English. Using the results of the analysis I postulate that such errors are often an effect of not only interlingual transfer (in particular loan translation), but also conceptual transfer. In the final part of the paper I present some language teaching implications of these psycholinguistic considerations. I am convinced that contrastive tasks at the linguistic and conceptual levels can contribute to the elimination of article errors committed by language learners.