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Abstract:
The implementation of subject-verb number
agreement in English is characterised by a striking
singular/plural asymmetry: Under laboratory conditions, the
probability of English speakers producing a number agreement
error on the verb immediately following a complex subject NP is
influenced by the mismatch in number between the head and 'local'
nouns in the subject NP when the mismatching local noun is plural
((b), compared to (a)), but not when the mismatching local noun
is singular ((d), compared to (c)) (Bock & Cutting, 1992;
Bock & Miller, 1991; see Eberhard, 1997 for further
theoretical study).
a. The proposal by the expert
(Singular Head, Head/Local Match)
b. The proposal by the experts (Singular Head,
Head/Local Mismatch)
c. The proposals by the experts (Plural Head,
Head/Local Match)
d. The proposals by the expert (Plural Head,
Head/Local Mismatch)
This asymmetry has also been found in native
speakers of other Indo-European languages including Spanish
(Vigliocco et al, 1996).
The present study examines whether this processing
characteristic can be found in agreement implementation by
competent users of English as a second language. It
investigates, in particular, the 'learnability' of native-like
agreement implementation by learners whose first language is or
is not similar to English in terms of subject-verb agreement and
morphological marking of plurality on nouns.
Advanced Chinese and Spanish learners of English
were tested on subject NPs like (a) to (d) in a spoken sentence
completion task conducted in English. Participants were
screened according to their performance in the Head/Local Match
conditions (i.e., (a) and (c)) in order to ascertain that they
had acquired, and were using fairly reliably, the basic
subject-verb number agreement rule in English. The
singular/plural asymmetry was found in the Spanish participants,
who produced more agreement errors in (b) than in (a) but were no
more likely to produce errors in (d) than in (c). In
contrast, there was little sign of the asymmetry in the Chinese
participants' performance in that the number mismatch between the
head and local nouns affected both the singular- and plural-head
conditions: (b) and (d) elicited significantly more errors than
(a) and (c) respectively.
It is impossible to conclude from the present data
whether the Spanish participants were using their L1 processing
system to deal with their L2 or they were using a functionally
and/or neuroanatomically independent L2 processing system (cf.
Kim et al, 1997), to which the processing characteristics of the
L1 system had been transferred. What is clear is that
proficient Chinese learners of English (whose L1 has no
subject-verb agreement and no morphological marking of plurality
on nouns) implemented subject-verb number agreement in a
qualitatively different manner from native speakers of
English. This result will be discussed with reference to
recent proposals about the acquisition of 'functional' categories
in the literature on the generative approach to second language
acquisition.
References
Bock & Cutting (1992). JML, 31,
99-127
Bock & Miller (1991). CogPsy, 23,
45-93
Eberhard (1997). JML, 36, 147-164
Kim et al. (1997). Nature, 388,
171-174
Vigliocco et al. (1996). Cognition, 61,
261-298.
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