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Japanese EFL learners’ sentence processing of conceptual plurality: An analysis focusing on reciprocal verbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2018

YU TAMURA Open the ORCID record for YU TAMURA [Opens in a new window] ,
JUNYA FUKUTA ,
YOSHITO NISHIMURA ,
YUI HARADA ,
KAZUHISA HARA  and
DAIKI KATO
YU TAMURA*
Affiliation:
Kansai University
JUNYA FUKUTA
Affiliation:
Shizuoka University
YOSHITO NISHIMURA
Affiliation:
Nagoya University
YUI HARADA
Affiliation:
Meijo University Senior High School
KAZUHISA HARA
Affiliation:
Okazaki Women’s Junior College
DAIKI KATO
Affiliation:
Tokoname Senior High School
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Yu Tamura, Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Kansai University, 3-3-35 Yamate-cho, Suita-shi, Osaka, 564-8680, Japan. E-mail: yutamura@kansai-u.ac.jp
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Abstract

This study aimed to investigate how Japanese learners of English as a foreign language, whose first language does not have obligatory morphological number marking, process conceptual plurality. The targeted structure was reciprocal verbs, which require conceptual plurality to interpret their meanings correctly. The results of a sentence completion task confirmed that participants could use reciprocal verbs reciprocally in English. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read sentences with reciprocal verbs and those with optionally transitive verbs (e.g., while the king and the queen kissed/left the baby read the book in the bed). There was no reading time delay for reciprocal verbs but a delay for optionally transitive verbs. Therefore, the participants succeeded in processing second language conceptual plurality in the online sentence comprehension task.

Keywords

conceptual pluralityEnglishgarden-path effectJapanese EFL learnersreciprocal verbs
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 59 - 91
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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