Plural marking in the second language: Atomicity, definiteness, and transfer

Abstract

This paper examines whether second language (L2)-English learners whose native languages (L1; Korean and Mandarin) lack obligatory plural marking transfer the properties of plural marking from their L1s, and whether transfer is manifested both offline (in a grammaticality judgment task) and online (in a self-paced reading task). The online task tests the predictions of the morphological congruency hypothesis (Jiang 2007), according to which L2 learners have particular difficulty automatically activating the meaning of L2 morphemes that are incongruent with their L1. Experiment 1 tests L2 learners’ sensitivity to errors of –s oversuppliance with mass nouns, while Experiment 2 tests their sensitivity to errors of –s omission with count nouns. The findings show that (a) L2 learners detect errors with nonatomic mass nouns (sunlights) but not atomic ones (furnitures), both offline and online; and (b) L1-Korean L2-English learners are more successful than L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in detecting missing –s with definite plurals (these boat), while the two groups behave similarly with indefinite plurals (many boat). Given that definite plurals require plural marking in Korean but not in Mandarin, the second finding is consistent with L1-transfer. Overall, the findings show that learners are able to overcome morphological incongruency and acquire novel uses of L2 morphemes.

Memory systems modulate crosslinguistic influence on third language morphosyntactic acquisition

“…For the Verb condition, as evidenced by the examples in Table 3 .1, grammatical verb forms were consistently longer and more morphologically complex than the ungrammatical verb form. Earlier literature [ 53 – 55 ] has revealed a word length effect during sentence reading, which was observable in our native speakers’ longer RT for past-tense verbs than present-tense verbs in grammatical sentences ( Fig 3 ). To minimize such effect, native speakers’ reading times for present- and past-tense verbs were fitted into a linear mixed model to estimate the effect of word length.…”

Child Second Language Development in Immersion Education

“…g., deMena Travis 2008;Lardiere 2008;Liceras, Zobl and Goodluck 2008;Tsimpli and Mastropavlou 2008;Slabakova 2019), several studies analyzed further phenomena in the syntax-semantics interface, such as the interpretation of quantifiers and other scopebearing expressions (e.g.,Dekydtspotter, Sprouse Anderson 1997;Dekydtspotter and Sprouse 2001;Gil and Marsden 2013;Marsden 2004), tense and aspect (e.g.,Gabriele 2005;Slabakova and Montrul 2003), argument structure and interpretation (e.g.,Oshita 2001;Montrul 2005) and the interpretation of definite and bare nominals (e.g.,Choi and Ionin 2021;Choi, Ionin and Zhu 2018;Chondrogianni, Vasić, Marinis and Blom 2015;Gil 2019;Hawkins and Hattori 2006;Ionin and Choi 2021;Ionin, Ko and Wexler 2004;Ionin and Montrul 2010;Slabakova 2006;Snape, Hirakawa, Hirakawa, Hosoi and Matthews 2014;Snape 2018Snape , 2019Yamada 2019). Several studies focused on L2A of definiteness and its semantics in Germanic and Romance languages (e.g., Bruhn de Garavito 2008; Hopp 2011; Ionin Contrasting Germanic and Romance acquisition of generic reference,Pérez-Leroux et al (…”