This talk will discuss an ongoing project on the production and comprehension of English singular and plural NPs by second language (L2) learners of English whose first language (L1), Mandarin Chinese, does not have obligatory plural marking. Theoretical approaches to L2 acquisition of differ with regard to whether learners can become target-like with novel inflectional morphemes (e.g., the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, Lardiere 2009) or whether they can never fully integrate novel morphemes into their Interlanguage grammars (e.g., the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis, MCH, Jiang et al. 2017).
The completed part of this project (Ionin, Atiles, Choi, Lee & Wu 2024; Ionin, Atiles, Lee & Wu, in prep) had the following objectives: (1) To systematically investigate both production and comprehension of plural marking with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners; (2) to examine whether learners can become target-like in their production and comprehension of English plural marking with increased proficiency; and (3) to examine whether learners’ performance depends on the available cues to plurality, and on task modality as well as task complexity. The results paint a nuanced picture: while overall less accurate than native speakers, learners do show evidence of the English plural marker being integrated into their grammar. The results pose a challenge to the MCH, while also showing that learners’ command over English plural marking is fairly fragile and subject to task effects. The talk will conclude with a preview of our current study (currently in the design stage), which builds upon the completed work and compares the second language acquisition of verbal and nominal number of morphology.