Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Kansai University, 3-3-35 Yamate-Cho, Suita-Shi, Osaka, 564-8680, Japan.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2023 Apr;52(2):675-690. doi: 10.1007/s10936-022-09915-2. Epub 2022 Oct 29.
It has been argued that languages differ in the extent to which they allow plural forms of nouns according to the Animacy Hierarchy. Japanese distinguishes between animate and inanimate nouns; the latter are less likely to receive plural markers (e.g., ?hon‑tachi), unlike English. This L1-L2 difference might cause difficulty in acquiring the plural morpheme. The present study thus investigates the influence of animacy on the processing of the English plural morpheme in online sentence processing. In this study, 34 Japanese university students engaged in a moving window version of a self-paced reading task, during which they also judged whether the number of words presented was one or two when prompted. If animacy matters, Japanese EFL learners might not show an interference effect of this second task for inanimate nouns. However, as no such effect was found, the prediction based on the animacy hierarchy was not confirmed.
有人认为，语言在根据“生命性层级”允许名词复数形式的程度上存在差异。日语区分有生命和无生命的名词；后者不太可能接受复数标记（例如，?hon-tachi），与英语不同。这种母语-二语差异可能导致习得复数词素的困难。因此，本研究调查了生命性对在线句子处理中英语复数词素加工的影响。在这项研究中，34 名日本大学生参与了一个移动窗口式的自我调整阅读任务，在此期间，当被提示时，他们还判断呈现的单词数是一个还是两个。如果生命性很重要，日语作为第二语言的学习者可能不会对无生命名词的第二个任务表现出干扰效应。然而，由于没有发现这种效应，基于生命性层级的预测并未得到证实。
