number agreement | Yu Tamura's Web

Although Native speakers (NSs) of English make plural agreement in preverbal-subject sentences (e.g., A pen and eraser *is/are…), previous studies have demonstrated that they prefer singular – not plural – agreement between verbs and conjoined noun phrases (NPs) in expletive there constructions (e.g., there is/are a pen and an eraser…), showing efficiency-driven processing prioritization of agreement between nearest constituents. This paper assesses whether Japanese L2 learners of English (JLE) show this tendency. The results of two self-paced reading experiments together indicated that even though efficiency-driven processing was available to L2 learners, their use was unstable due to the repeated exposure to there are NP_pl– and NP_pl-type sentences during the task. It seems possible that repeated exposure triggered learners’ knowledge that that conjoined NPs are always plural. Hence, it could conceivably be hypothesized that a learner’s specific knowledge intervenes the efficiency-driven processing strategy.

Tamura, Y., Fukuta, J., Nishimura, Y., & Kato, D. (2023). Rule-based or efficiency-driven processing of expletive there in English as a foreign language, 61, 1577–1606. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2021-0156 [Author Manuscript]

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether L2 learners of English can employ efficiency-driven number agreement processing with conjoined noun phrases (NPs) in expletive there constructions (ETC). Previous studies reported that native speakers of English prefer singular agreement over plural agreement when conjoined NPs are used in ETCs (e.g., there is a pen and an eraser…), which implies that native speakers (NSs) of English prioritize efficiency over the canonical agreement. The present study examined whether L2 learners can show similar processing tendencies. In Experiment 1, an offline error correction task was administered to Japanese L2 learners of English to see the learners’ explicit knowledge. The results indicated that they tend to make a plural agreement in ETCs. In Experiment 2, L2 learners were compared with NSs in the self-paced reading task, which demonstrated that—unlike the NS group—L2 learner group analyzed conjoined NPs as a plural. The fact that L2 learners preferred plural agreement could be due to their explicit knowledge that conjoined NP should always be plural. This knowledge led to a non-nativelike agreement in ETC in online sentence processing.