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We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic universal, atomicity holds across languages. However, the count/mass status of nouns may differ cross-linguistically. Our results, which show difficulty on atomic mass nouns in both learner groups, support an argument that atomicity is used as a semantic universal in the L2. Our results also suggest that both count/mass status in the L1 and word frequency in the L2 impact performance, suggesting roles for both L1 lexical transfer and lexical frequency. In addition, learners had better performance on abstract as opposed to concrete atomic mass nouns, providing evidence consistent with a theory of the accessibility of atoms.

This commentary discusses Westergaard's (2021) keynote article, which presents a comprehensive model of first language (L1), second language (L2), and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary presents evidence from a previous study of L3 learners that provides support for Westergaard's property-by-property transfer proposal. The commentary highlights strengths of the proposal, such as its focus on microvariation, and also outlines open questions, such as whether the model can predict in advance whether specific properties will be easier or harder to acquire.

This study investigates the processing of wh -dependencies in English by native speakers and advanced Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners. We examined processing at a filled gap site that was in a licit position (non-island) or located inside an island, a grammatically unlicensed position. Natives showed N400 in the non-island condition, which we take as evidence of gap prediction; no N400 emerged within the island. Learners yielded P600 in the non-island condition, suggesting learners did not predict a gap, but rather experienced syntactic integration difficulty. Like natives, learners showed no effects inside the island. Island sensitivity was also observed for both natives and learners in an offline acceptability judgment task. We also explored whether event-related potentials (ERP) responses were related to attentional control (AC), a cognitive ability that has been related to predictive processing in native speakers, in order to examine whether variability in processing in learners and native speakers is similarly explained. Results showed that increased AC was associated with larger N400s for natives and larger P600s for learners in the non-island condition, suggesting that increased AC may be related to prediction for natives and to integration effort for learners. Overall, learners demonstrated island sensitivity offline and online, suggesting that second language (L2) processing is indeed grammatically-guided. However, ERP results suggest that predictive processing in the resolution of wh -dependencies may be limited, at least for learners whose first language (L1) does not instantiate overt wh -movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate sensitivity to island constraints in English native speakers and Najdi Arabic learners of English, examining (1) whether second language (L2) learners whose native language (L1) does not instantiate overt wh -movement are sensitive to island constraints and (2) the source of island effects. Under a grammatical account of islands, these effects arise due to violations of syntactic constraints. Under the resource-limitation account, island effects arise due to processing difficulty. The source of island effects is interesting to examine in L2 learners because it is possible that reduced processing abilities in the L2 may lead to the low acceptance of sentences with island violations simply due to the complexity of the sentences themselves as opposed to an adherence to grammatical constraints. To tease apart these accounts, we followed Sprouse et al. in focusing on individual differences in working memory (WM). We used an acceptability judgment task (AJT) to quantify island sensitivity and an automated operation span task to measure WM. Building on Sprouse et al., the AJT tested four island types, but we made several modifications to the task design to address concerns raised by Hofmeister et al.: the stimuli included a 'context' sentence to improve the naturalness of the complex wh -sentences. The stimuli also included complex wh -fillers (e.g. which worker) as opposed to bare fillers (who), as semantically rich wh -phrases have been found to be easier to process. Our results showed that learners, like natives, exhibited island sensitivity, and there was no evidence that individual differences in WM modulated island sensitivity for either natives or learners. Our results are compatible with the grammatical view of island effects and suggest that wh -dependencies in both L1 and L2 grammars are similarly constrained by syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different theoretical accounts of second language (L2) acquisition differ with respect to whether or not advanced learners are predicted to show native-like processing for features not instantiated in the native language (L1). We examined how native speakers of English, a language with number but not gender agreement, process number and gender agreement in Spanish. We compare agreement within a determiner phrase ("órgano muy complejo" "[[subscript DP] organ[subscript-MASC-SG] very complex[subscript-MASC-SG]]") and across a verb phrase ("cuadro es auténtico" "painting[subscript-MASC-SG] [[subscript VP] is authentic[subscript-MASC-SG]]") in order to investigate whether native-like processing is limited to local domains (e.g. within the phrase), in line with Clahsen and Felser (2006). We also examine whether morphological differences in how the L1 and L2 realize a shared feature impact processing by comparing number agreement between nouns and adjectives, where only Spanish instantiates agreement, and between demonstratives and nouns, where English also instantiates agreement. Similar to Spanish natives, advanced learners showed a P600 for both number and gender violations overall, in line with the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996), which predicts that learners can show native-like processing for novel features. Results also show that learners can establish syntactic dependencies outside of local domains, as suggested by the presence of a P600 for both within and across-phrase violations. Moreover, similar to native speakers, learners were impacted by the structural distance (number of intervening phrases) between the agreeing elements, as suggested by the more positive waveforms for within-phrase than across-phrase agreement overall. These results are consistent with the proposal that learners are sensitive to hierarchical structure.

Previous studies on the second language acquisition of telicity have suggested that learners can use morphosyntactic cues to interpret sentences as telic or atelic even in cases where the cues differ in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) (Slabakova, 2001, 2005; Gabriele, 2008; Kaku et al., 2008a, 2008b). The present study extends this line of research by focusing on a case in which learners cannot rely on morphosyntactic cues in order to reach the appropriate aspectual interpretation. We examine the acquisition of telicity by English-speaking learners of Japanese, focusing on how learners interpret bare count nouns such as "kaado" "card" that obligatorily display count noun morphosyntax in English. In Japanese, a bare noun such as "kaado" is ambiguous with respect to number and therefore a verb phrase such as "kaado-o kakimashita" "wrote card" can be interpreted as either telic "wrote the cards" or atelic "wrote cards" depending on the context. The results of two studies with both intermediate (Study 1: n = 38; Study 2: n = 38) and advanced (Study 1: n = 7; Study 2: n = 10) learners of Japanese show that there are learners at both levels of proficiency that have difficulty with the interpretation of bare count nouns and assign an exclusively telic reading to a verb phrase such as "kaado-o kakimashita" "wrote card". We argue that this interpretation is due to the boundedness of count nouns in L1 English and propose that a retreat from negative transfer is difficult when there is variability in the native speaker input and when meaning has to be derived from context in the absence of morphosyntactic cues. (Contains 14 notes, 3 tables, and 4 figures.)