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Current Perspectives on Generative SLA - Processing, Influence, and Interfaces: Selected proceedings of the 16th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference
Edited by Marta Velnić, Anne Dahl and Kjersti Faldet Listhaug
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 70] 2024
► pp. 134–169

Chapter 6
L2 acquisition of English flexible count and flexible mass nouns by L1-Japanese and L1-Spanish speakers

| Gunma Prefectural Women’s University
| Gunma Prefectural Women’s University
We examine the acquisition of the English count-mass distinction, in particular flexible nouns. Certain nouns are flexible in English as they can be either countable like a cake / cakes or mass such as cake. Our study is unique regarding the off-line and on-line tasks used and the L2 participant groups. We administered a quantity judgement task and a self-paced reading task to L1-Japanese and L1-Spanish speakers who judged four conditions – Count, Object, Substance and Flexible. The findings show that both L1-Japanese and L1-Spanish speakers performed differently on both tasks from the native speaker controls. We argue that the results of the self-paced reading task are inconsistent with the claims made by the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis (Jiang et al., 2011).
Keywords: flexible nouns, count-mass distinction, syntactic cues, L2 English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Count-mass nouns in English, Japanese, and Spanish
  • 3.L2 acquisition studies of the English count-mass distinction
    • 3.1L2 processing and the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis
  • 4.The study
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Quantity Judgement Task (QJT)
    • 4.3Self-paced reading task
    • 4.4Procedure
    • 4.5QJT results
    • 4.6SPRT Results
  • 5.Discussion and summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
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