This study aimed to investigate how Japanese EFL learners, whose first language does not have obligatory morphological number marking, process conceptual plurality. The targeted structure was reciprocal verbs, which require conceptual plurality to interpret their meanings correctly. The results of a sentence completion task (SCT) confirmed that participants could use reciprocal verbs reciprocally in English. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read sentences with reciprocal verbs and those with optionally transitive verbs (e.g., while the king and the queen kissed/left the baby read the book in the bed). There was no reading time delay for reciprocal verbs but a delay for optionally transitive verbs. Therefore, the participants succeeded in processing L2 conceptual plurality in the online sentence comprehension task.
notional number
The notional number attraction in English as a foreign language: A self-paced reading study
The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether or not the notional number attraction phenomenon is evident during L2 learners’ online processing of subject–verb agreement. L2 sentence processing studies have frequently reported the L2 learners’ online insensitivity to number mismatches, and it has been claimed that L2 learners have difficulty in representing grammatical number features, or they have a tendency to fail to access the number features in online tasks. L2 learners’ sensitivity to “notional number”, however, has not been considered by researchers. Hence, this research conducted a self-paced reading study targeting highly proficient Japanese learners of English (N = 28). The participants read the three types of sentences; (a) control (e.g., everyone in the room was/were…), (b) notional attraction (e.g., everyone in the team was/were…), and (c) grammatical attraction (e.g., everyone in the halls was/were…). In order to examine the participants’ sensitivity to number attractions, the differences in the reading times between the number matched and the mismatched verbs (was/were) were compared among the attraction types. The observed reading time differences in the grammatical and notional attraction condition were different than in the control condition, indicating that both attraction phenomena were evident. L2 learners’ imperfect representation of number features, which we call representation vulnerability, was discussed.
Yu Tamura 