Number matters: enhancing nominal number to facilitate subject-verb agreement

This dissertation examined whether Chinese-speaking learners’ processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement in English is modulated by the accessibility of number features in the subject noun phrase, given that in English S-V agreement the verbal form is dependent on the number of the sentence subject. It has been argued that second language (L2) learners are insensitive to agreement violations online when their native language (L1) does not instantiate agreement (Jiang et al., 2011). Other proposals argue that learners show variability towards agreement due to weak specification of the features (Grüter et al. 2012; Hopp, 2013, 2016), and that via training L2 morpho-syntactic processing can be more native-like (Prévost & White, 2000; Ionin & Wexler, 2002; White, 2003). Given that Chinese does not instantiate obligatory plural-marking or S-V agreement, it is possible that Chinese-speaking learners’ difficulty in accessing the nominal number feature, which is encoded via the plural morpheme in English, influences their processing of S-V agreement.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Kansas

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Tang, Wenting

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Gabriele, Alison
• Fiorentino, Robert

• Agreement
• Feature Accessibility
• L1 Chinese L2 English
• Morphology
• Second Language Acquisition
• Training

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

https://www.proquest.com/LegacyDocView/DISSNUM/28030125

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/38345