In English and Chinese, questions with a wh-object and a universally quantified
subject (e.g.What did everyone buy?) allow an individual answer (Everyone bought
apples.) and a pair-list answer (Sam bought apples, Jo bought bananas,
Sally bought...). By contrast, the pair-list answer is reportedly unavailable in
Japanese and Korean. This article documents an experimental investigation of the
interpretation of such questions in non-native Japanese by learners whose first
languages (Lls) are Korean, Chinese or English. The results show that, regardless of
L1, only a minority of advanced second language (L2) Japanese learners demonstrate
knowledge of the absence of pair-list readings in Japanese. In English-Japanese and
Chinese-Japanese interlanguage, L1 transfer readily accounts for this finding: the
L1 grammar, which allows pair-list readings, may obstruct acquisition of the more
restrictive Japanese grammar. But in Korean-Japanese interlanguage, L1 transfer
predicts rejection of pair-list answers. However, in a Korean version of the
experimental task, a native Korean control group robustly accepts pair-list
readings, contra expectations. A proposal to account for this finding is put
forward, under which the Korean-Japanese interlanguage data become compatible with
an L1-transfer-based model of L2 acquisition. Moreover, the native-like rejection of
pair-list readings by some advanced learners of all three L1 backgrounds is argued
to imply that UG constraints operate at the L2 syntax-semantics interface.
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