This study investigates determiner usage by Chinese learners of English, taking account of the Fluctuation Hypothesis by Ionin, Ko, and Wexler (2004), which states that learners’ article choice fluctuates for mixed settings of the semantic parameters definiteness and specificity. In an attempt to combine corpus-linguistic and cognitive approaches, the study employs a dual methodology: corpus data is complemented by data collected through a forced choice elicitation test. The forced choice elicitation test data was obtained using an online survey with 39 participants, most of whom are students at Sun Yat-sen University. The corpus data, from which three 100 sentence random samples were analyzed, was taken from the Sun Yat-sen University Corpus (SYSU-C), compiled by Küchler (2015).