The interpretation of English bare plurals by native Japanese speakers

Abstract

This study investigates whether L1 Japanese L2 English learners can acquire the knowledge that English bare plurals prohibit specific readings, despite the absence of explicit evidence for this constraint in the input. In Japanese, bare plurals permit both generic and specific readings, whereas in English they allow only generic readings. This cross-linguistic difference creates a potential poverty-of-the-stimulus issue for Japanese-speaking learners of English. To examine whether learners can acquire this constraint, we conducted a sentence–picture matching truth-value judgment task with 30 L1 Japanese L2 English learners and 11 native English speakers. The L2 English participants also completed LexTALE to measure English proficiency. The results show that native English speakers consistently rejected the specific reading of English bare plurals, while native Japanese speakers consistently accepted both specific and generic readings in Japanese. Among the L2 learners, 43% consistently rejected the specific reading while accepting the generic reading in English, indicating successful acquisition of the target constraint. A generalized linear mixed-effects analysis further reveals that learners’ sensitivity to the restriction increases significantly with English proficiency. We argue that learners gradually eliminate the transferred specific reading as a result of distributional evidence in the input, which aligns with Yang’s (2003) variational learning model.