Although Native speakers (NSs) of English make plural agreement in preverbal-subject sentences (e.g., A pen and eraser *is/are…), previous studies have demonstrated that they prefer singular – not plural – agreement between verbs and conjoined noun phrases (NPs) in expletive there constructions (e.g., there is/are a pen and an eraser…), showing efficiency-driven processing prioritization of agreement between nearest constituents. This paper assesses whether Japanese L2 learners of English (JLE) show this tendency. The results of two self-paced reading experiments together indicated that even though efficiency-driven processing was available to L2 learners, their use was unstable due to the repeated exposure to there are NP_pl– and NP_pl-type sentences during the task. It seems possible that repeated exposure triggered learners’ knowledge that that conjoined NPs are always plural. Hence, it could conceivably be hypothesized that a learner’s specific knowledge intervenes the efficiency-driven processing strategy.

Tamura, Y., Fukuta, J., Nishimura, Y., & Kato, D. (2023). Rule-based or efficiency-driven processing of expletive there in English as a foreign language, 61, 1577–1606. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2021-0156 [Author Manuscript]