What is it about?
In Japanese, making a noun plural (like adding -s in English) is optional and rarely used for objects — you can say "I bought book" without specifying how many. This study asked: does that habit carry over when Japanese speakers learn English? Participants read English sentences word by word and, at key moments, quickly judged whether one or two words appeared on screen. Because plural nouns like players or bikes contain a "more-than-one" meaning, that meaning was expected to slow down the judgment — but only for living things (animals, people), not objects, if Japanese habits were interfering. Surprisingly, the interference appeared for both types of nouns.
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Why is it important?
Most previous research tested whether learners noticed errors in sentences — a method that confounds knowledge of plurality with knowledge of grammatical agreement. This study isolates the form-meaning link itself: does the -s morpheme automatically trigger a "more than one" interpretation? The finding that Japanese learners do show this automatic activation — even for inanimate nouns their L1 rarely pluralizes — challenges a widely cited hypothesis (the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis) and suggests that the boundary between animate and inanimate pluralization may matter less than previously assumed, at least at intermediate proficiency.
Perspectives
When I designed this study, I genuinely expected to find the animacy effect — the logic seemed tight. The null result was initially frustrating, but I came to see it as more informative than a confirmation would have been. What surprised me most was the reversed pattern: if anything, inanimate plurals produced stronger interference than animate ones. I suspect the collective reading that Japanese -tachi triggers for human nouns may be quietly dampening the plural signal in the animate condition — a confound I could not fully control for with this design. That loose thread is what I find most worth pulling in future work.
Yu Tamura
Kansai Daigaku
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Investigation of the Relationship Between Animacy and L2 Learners’ Acquisition of the English Plural Morpheme, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, October 2022, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-022-09915-2.
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