Sensitivity to missing plural marking in L2 English: A role for cross-linguistic influence?

Abstract

This article examines whether the second language (L2) acquisition of English plural marking by learners from Generalized Classifier first languages (L1s) is affected by L1 transfer. Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean exhibit micro-variation with regard to contexts in which plural markers are required, optional, or disallowed. This article lays out the predictions for L1 transfer from these three languages to English, based on the micro-variation, and under different theoretical approaches to transfer (the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis of Lardiere and the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis of Jiang et al.). The article then reviews seven studies that use online processing tasks in order to gauge whether L1 Mandarin / L1 Japanese / L1 Korean L2 English learners are sensitive to the omission of plural marking in English. The findings of these studies are discussed in light of the predictions based on micro-variation; the article lays out directions for possible future studies that would directly address L1 transfer in this domain.