What is it about?
In English, native speakers find "There is a cat and a dog on the sofa" more natural than "There are a cat and a dog on the sofa," even though two things are mentioned. This is because the verb tends to agree with the first noun it encounters rather than waiting to process the whole phrase. Do Japanese learners of English show the same tendency, or do they apply the rule they learned — that two nouns joined by and always take a plural verb? This study had Japanese learners read sentences word by word while their reading times were measured, comparing expletive there sentences with ordinary subject-first sentences. The results revealed something unexpected: learners initially processed these sentences like native speakers, but as the experiment continued and they encountered more examples, their knowledge that "and means plural" gradually took over, overriding the native-like strategy.
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Why is it important?
Most research on L2 grammar processing asks whether learners follow or violate a rule. This study asks a different question: when two competing influences are both available — a processing strategy that native speakers use implicitly, and explicit grammatical knowledge the learner has been taught — which one wins, and under what conditions? The finding that the native-like strategy was present early in the task but eroded with repeated exposure suggests that L2 learners' metalinguistic knowledge can actively interfere with processing in real time. This is not a simple "failure to acquire" story; it is a story about learners applying their knowledge too broadly and in the wrong place. That distinction matters for how we model L2 processing and for what we teach.
Perspectives
This project started as a fairly straightforward replication-and-extension of earlier pilot work, but the trial-order interaction in Experiment 2 was not something any of us anticipated. When the processing preference flipped across the course of a single session, it forced us to think seriously about what "availability of a strategy" actually means — not a static property of a learner's grammar, but something that can be destabilized within minutes of exposure. That is a genuinely unsettling finding if you think about it carefully, because it implies that laboratory results about L2 processing may be far more context-dependent than the field tends to assume. I would have liked to follow up on this more directly in subsequent work, though the design demands to do it cleanly are considerable.
Yu Tamura
Kansai Daigaku
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Rule-based or efficiency-driven processing of expletive there in English as a foreign language, IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, April 2022, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/iral-2021-0156.
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