Abstract
Because the Japanese language does not have a robust plural morpheme system, it is morphologically incongruent with English. As such, L1 Japanese learners of L2 English are argued to be unable to fully acquire English plural morphemes. While previous studies have revealed limitations in L2 processing, recent studies have revealed that advanced-learners are sensitive to incongruent morphology. However, these studies have largely investigated processing within English as a second language context. As such, the present study investigated the sensitivity to inflectional number agreement in English by Japanese learners of English in Japan using the Lexical Maze Task. The results revealed that these learners were sensitive to violations in number agreement for both plural (this *dogs) and null (these *cat) morphemes. However, further analysis revealed that this was modulated by English proficiency. While participants with higher English ability were found to reveal greater sensitivity to ungrammatical morphemes, it was found that this was only the case for the ungrammatical plural (this *dogs). The ungrammatical null (these *cat) was instead revealed to evoke longer responses times by low proficiency learners, and high proficiency learners showed no sensitivity. This might be explained by a greater lexical variability among more advanced learners. Accordingly, this study demonstrates that despite morphological incongruence, non-advanced Japanese learners of English in Japan can acquire the English plural -S morpheme.
Highlights
The results indicated that JEFL learners are sensitive to the disagreement in number agreement between feature-checking dependencies supporting the findings of Song (2015) and Wen et al (2010) and refuting the claims of the morphological congruency hypothesis (Jiang et al, 2011)
Despite Japanese learners of English having been previously thought to be unable to acquire the plural -S morpheme in English, this study effectively reveals that these learners have sensitivity to violations in number agreement for both plural -S and the singular null form, replicating recent research
We do believe that morphological incongruence does play an important role for the acquisition of a morphological category in a second language such that congruency may benefit the acquisition process
Summary
Put, when learning a second language (L2), the ability to attain a morphological category is dependent on whether the category exists and functions in a similar capacity within the first language. A classic example would be the number agreement errors produced byL1 Chinese and Japanese learners of L2 English (e.g., the plural -S & the 3rd person -S). According to this account, despite both languages having plural morphemes (e.g., -men in Chinese & -tati in Japanese), because both languages lack a robust plural marking system, ultimate attainment of the plural marking system in English should not be possible
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