Number Attraction in EFL Learners’ Subject-Verb Agreement and the Effect of Distance

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate Korean EFL learners’ sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violation and to examine effects of local number attraction, plural markedness, and distance on their agreement computation. Sixty-six Korean adult learners of English at mid- and high proficiencies participated in an experiment which combined self-paced reading and timed acceptability judgement. They were asked to read sentences region by region and rate their acceptability. All sentences contained a local noun that disagreed with the subject noun in number. They varied in terms of (i) grammaticality (i.e., agreement-violating vs. non-violating) and (ii) noun number (i.e., singular subject N/plural local N vs. plural subject N/singular local N). Half of the items had a short-distance condition and half had a long-distance condition. Analyses of participants’ responses showed that learners were generally sensitive to agreement violation when judging acceptability. In addition, proficient learners exhibited biased sensitivity to noun plurality, resulting in mismatch asymmetry in both acceptability judgment and self-paced reading, showing native-like response patterns. Distance between the subject and the verb resulted in reduced sensitivity to agreement violation. These findings suggest that learners can gradually become more sensitive to agreement violation and process subject-verb agreement in a nativelike pattern even when relevant morpho-syntactic features are not instantiated in their L1.