Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 2018, 8, 176-198
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojml
ISSN Online: 2164-2834
ISSN Print: 2164-2818

The (In)Sensitivity of Plural -S by Japanese
Learners of English
Michael P. Mansbridge1,2, Katsuo Tamaoka1
Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
Overseas Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan1
2

How to cite this paper: Mansbridge, M. P.,& Tamaoka, K. (2018). The (In)Sensitivityof Plural -S by Japanese Learners of English. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
8, 176-198.
https://doi.org/10.4236/ojml.2018.85017
Received: September 8, 2018
Accepted: October 15, 2018
Published: October 18, 2018
Copyright © 2018 by authors andScientific Research Publishing Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International
License (CC BY 4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Open Access

Abstract
Because the Japanese language does not have a robust plural morpheme system, it is morphologically incongruent with English. As such, L1 Japaneselearners of L2 English are argued to be unable to fully acquire English pluralmorphemes. While previous studies have revealed limitations in L2
processing, recent studies have revealed that advanced-learners are sensitive
to incongruent morphology. However, these studies have largely investigatedprocessing within English as a second language context. As such, the present
study investigated the sensitivity to inflectional number agreement in English
by Japanese learners of English in Japan using the Lexical Maze Task. The
results revealed that these learners were sensitive to violations in number
agreement for both plural (this *dogs) and null (these *cat) morphemes.
However, further analysis revealed that this was modulated by English proficiency. While participants with higher English ability were found to reveal
greater sensitivity to ungrammatical morphemes, it was found that this was
only the case for the ungrammatical plural (this *dogs). The ungrammaticalnull (these *cat) was instead revealed to evoke longer responses times by low
proficiency learners, and high proficiency learners showed no sensitivity. Thismight be explained by a greater lexical variability among more advanced
learners. Accordingly, this study demonstrates that despite morphologicalincongruence, non-advanced Japanese learners of English in Japan can acquire the English plural -S morpheme.

Keywords
Congruency, JEFL, L2 Processing, Lexical Variability, Number Agreement

1. Introduction
This study aims to test the validity of the Morpheme Congruency Hypothesis
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M. P. Mansbridge, K. Tamaoka(Jiang, Novokshanova, Masuda, & Wang, 2011) and the Failed Functional Fea-tures Hypothesis (Hawkins & Chan, 1997). Briefly put, when learning a second
language (L2), the ability to ultimately attain a morphological category is dependent on whether the category also exists and functions in a similar capacity
within the first language. For instance, if the L1 and L2 both encode for genderor number at the morphological level, then learners of the L2 will likely be able
to fully acquire the L2 morphemes (e.g., L1 French & L2 Spanish). In contrast, if
the L1 lacks the L2 morphological category, then it is expected that there would
be deficits in its acquisition. A classic example would be the number agreement
errors produced byL1 Chinese and Japanese learners of L2 English (e.g., theplural -S & the 3rd person -S). According to this account, despite both languages
having plural morphemes (e.g., -men in Chinese & -tati in Japanese), because
both languages lack a robust plural marking system, ultimate attainment of theplural marking system in English should not be possible.
While there is evidence supporting this claim (Jiang, 2004, 2007; Jiang et al.,2011), other findings (Song, 2015; Wen, Miyao, Takeda, Chen, & Schwartz,2010) cast doubt on its claims. Accordingly, the current investigation aims todetermine to what degree native-speaking Japanese learners of English in Japanare sensitive to number agreement errors in a Japan context. It is our argumentthat Japanese learners of English have a greater degree of difficulty detecting violations in number agreement for the null morpheme in comparison to the overt
plural -S morpheme.

1.1. Inflectional Morphology
The English language is classified as being mostly analytic with little morphology
in comparison to languages with richer inflectional morphology such as the agglutinative language Japanese. Despite Japanese utilizing morphosyntax moreregularly, both the English and Japanese language code for nominal plurality
using inflectional suffixes. However, English plural morphology is obligatory for
regular nominal marking while in Japanese, the morphological suffixes -tati/raare optional, are reserved to denote + HUMAN or + ANIMATE, and are more
restrictive than English plural morphemes (Hosoi, 2005; Kurafuji, 2004). As seen
in examples (1a) and (1b) below, English numerical inflections differ from Japanese such that the null form denotes singularity whereas in Japanese, the null
form is unmarked for singularity and plurality.
(1a) English Numerical Inflections
singular = student - φ = student

plural = student -s = students(1b) Japanese Numerical Inflections
singular/plural = gakusei - φ = gakusei

plural = gakusei -tati = gakuseitati

Not only do the languages differ regarding morpheme usage, they also differ
in their rules for number agreement between feature-checking dependencies.
When a nominal expression is in the scope of a numerical quantifier, number
must agree between the two dependencies in English. In Japanese, on the other
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hand, this is not exactly the case. Interestingly, plural quantifiers are typicallyconsidered to not require or even allow the plural morpheme when the noun isin scope of a quantifier (Kurafuji, 2004). However, the two languages do sharethe specific aspect that neither allows for a plural morpheme suffixed to a noun
within the scope of a quantifier denoting singularity. In summary, not only are
English and Japanese incongruent for the usage of plural morphology, they arealso incongruent for feature-checking.
(2a) English Number Agreement
This(singular) student(singular)This(singular) *students(plural)

These(plural) students(plural)

These(singular) *student(singular)(2b) Japanese Number Agreement

Hitori-no‘one’(singular) gakusei‘student’(singular)
Futari-no‘two’(plural)? gakuseitati‘students’(plural)
Sono‘that’ gakusei‘students’(singular/plural)

Hitori-no(singular) *gakuseitati(plural)
Futari-no(plural) gakusei(plural)
Sono gakuseitati(plural)

1.2. Second Language Acquisition Theory
For second language acquisition (SLA), while it is agreed that morpheme acquisition is an imposing task for L2 learners, there are two opposing arguments forL2 morphosyntactic acquisition. On one side, some researchers consider that L2
learners are limited in their inherent ability to acquire and process a second
language, and as a result, ultimate attainment of L2 morphosyntax is unlikely.
For instance, the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman, 1990)
states that while L1 acquisition is guided by Universal Grammar (UG), adult L2
acquisition is not which imposes difficulties on L2 acquisition and leaves learners with an incompleteL2 grammar (Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva,
2010; Meisel, 1991; Schachter, 1988).
Similarly, the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b)
states that L2 learners are limited in their capability to perform feature-checks
between dependencies, retrieve and integrate a dependency within working
memory and processes syntactic movement for non-local arguments. In otherwords, L2 learners have an impaired morphosyntactic representation and instead must rely on semantics to understand an L2 sentence. In a more specificmanner, both the morpheme congruency hypothesis (Jiang et al., 2011) and thefailed functional features hypothesis (Hawkins & Chan, 1997) predict that L2
learners are unable to acquire a morphosyntactic category not found in the L1
and thus would have an incomplete representation of said morpheme.
While the above arguments are based in differing frameworks, they agree thatL2 learners have an impaired representation of morphosyntax which prevents
learners from achieving native-like processing. As such, these arguments makethe claim that errors and lack of sensitivity to ungrammatical forms result fromissues of L2 linguistic competence rather than issues of real-time performance(Jiang, 2004).
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bakova, 2003; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; White & Genesee, 1996) instead argue
that adult L2 learners do have UG mediated based learning and ultimate attainment of a novel morphological category is achievable. A major claim of this position is that production errors merely reflect deficits in performance and that an
L2 learner has, more or less, an unimpaired representation of morphologicalfeatures and their agreement rules on the abstract level.
Prévost and White (2000) posit that errors elicited are often systematic in nature. For instance, while Prévost and White (1999) found that L2 learners ofFrench and German overproduced non-finite verbs forms in finite contexts, finite verb forms in non-finite contexts were approximately absent. As such, their

Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White, 2000) suggests that L2
learners have greater difficulties in the mapping of morphological features undertask pressure (i.e., spontaneous production), thus causing L2 learners to rely on
default forms. This in turn creates increased variability for non-default morphemes. Importantly, however, they argue that this increased variability does notnecessarily represent the abstract representation of morphological forms andthus L2 learners should have higher performance ability during offline tasks.
Additional support for performance deficits is derived from studies observing
greater limitations in working memory for L2 learners (Keating, 2010; McDonald, 2006). Consequently, errors and insensitivity to grammatical violations
might better represent learners’ performance limitations rather than their competence or lack thereof.
Moving on to the acquisition of morphological categories, previous studies(Bailey, Madden, & Krashen, 1974; Dulay & Burt, 1974a, 1974b; Goldschneider& DeKeyser, 2001; Krashen, 1977; Krashen, Sferlazza, Feldman, & Fathman,1976) have outlined the sequential pattern of morphological categories for bothchild and adult L2 learners and revealed a similar pattern, which has been successfully applied to many languages. Importantly, the plural -S morpheme is regarded to be acquired relatively early during the development process. While
Krashen (1977) claimed that this order is not subject to L1 interference, thatclaim is now regarded as inaccurate, and the morphological acquisition order isinfluenced by a learner’s L1 and exposure to the target language (see Ellis, 2002;
Larsen-Freeman, 1976).
In a similar vein, some researchers make the argument that for particular L1
groups, observed difficulties or benefits during acquisition can be attributed to
L1 transfer or interlingual differences/similarities (Andersen, 1984; Bryant, 1984;
Chen, Shu, Liu, Zhao, & Li, 2007; Luk & Shirai, 2009; Yip & Matthews, 2000).
Due to the absence of a robust plural morphological system, L1 Chinese/Japanese
speakers learning English appear to have additional difficulty acquiring the plural -S morpheme. Even English as a second language (ESL) learners have difficulty correctly using plural -S even after years of living in an English-speaking
country (Schmidt, 1983). Accordingly, Japanese learners of English might be incorrectly using their L1 grammar when processing L2 English. This is expected
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to make the acquisition of English plural -S morpheme more difficult, but notunattainable.
Evidence of Japanese learners of English increased difficulty with acquiring
the plural morpheme comes from Tono (2000, 2009) who revealed that Japanese
ESL learners’ distribution of errors suggests that their developmental stage ofacquisition is delayed for the plural morpheme in comparison to other languages
and morphological categories. However, it might be difficult to tease apart if this
delayed acquisition results from morphological incongruence, language transfer
or both.
The distribution of errors revealed by Tono (2000, 2009), however, might havefurther relevance to the lack of sensitivity to violations and errors produced by
L2 learners. Returning to the subject that learners’ errors are a result of variability and real-time mapping difficulties (Prévost & White, 2000), Hopp (2010,2012, 2016) has demonstrated that lexical and grammatical variability can impair
both L1 and L2 speakers’ predictability for morphological agreement during
processing. Using the visual-world paradigm of eye-tracking, Hopp (2016) observed that by introducing violations of gender agreement in German, native
speakers relied less on morphological gender cues to predict a noun which mirrored how non-native speakers are typically observed to process L2 German.
Accordingly, an additional argument can be made that L2 learners lack of sensitivity to violations in agreement might also partially result from their high exposure to L2 errors, thus reinforcing lexical and grammatical variability in theprocessing of an L2. Consequently, Tono’s (2000, 2009) finding would suggestthat Japanese learners of English would have a greater amount of variability forthe plural -S morpheme.
In the following section, several case studies in relation to agreement will be
discussed. We highlight relevant studies on the processing of the plural -S morpheme in English by speakers from an incongruent language.

1.3. Previous Studies
Jiang et al. (2011) set out to replicate the previous claims (Clahsen & Felser,
2006a, 2006b; Clahsen et al., 2010; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003; Jiang, 2004, 2007)
that there are limitations imposed on learners when acquiring and processing a
new language. Specifically, they aimed to demonstrate that in order to acquire an
L2 morpheme, the L1 must have a congruent morpheme. To validate this claim,
they investigated the processing of the English plural morpheme by Japaneseand Russian learners of the English. Importantly, Russian shares a congruent
number morpheme while Japanese lacks a similar category. See below for an
example of their stimuli.
(3a) Grammatical Plural Agreement
She picked a few of her dresses and left quickly.
(3b) Ungrammatical Plural Agreement
She picked a few of her *dress and left quickly.
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Following the design of Jiang (2004; 2007) and using self-paced reading, Jiang
et al. (2011) found that their Russian group demonstrated native-like sensitivity
to the violation of (3b) while their Japanese group failed to reveal any difference.
As such, they concluded that morphological incongruence restricts the acquisition of a novel L2 morphological category.
While Jiang and colleagues maintain that morphological incongruence is aroadblock to full-acquisition, others instead argue that it merely hinders or provides no additional benefit to acquisition. Emphasizing this issue is two studies
by Gillon-Dowens, Vergara, Barber, and Carreiras (2010) and Gillon-Dowens,
Guo, Guo, Barber, and Carreiras (2011) who investigated the processing of L2
Spanish by advanced L1 English and Chinese speakers respectively. The importance of these two L1 groups is that while English is morphologically congruent
to Spanish in the domain of numerical morphology, it is incongruent regarding
gender agreement. Chinese, in contrast, is incongruent for both morphologicalaspects. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure the event related potentials (ERP) of these learners, they found that L1 English speakers had increased sensitivity to violations of number agreement in comparison to genderagreement while L1 Chinese learners of Spanish had equal sensitivity to the violations. Consequently, while morphological congruency did not impair the sensitivity to violations of a new morphological category, it was shown to increase
sensitivity where the languages agreed with one another. Thus, it can be considered a boon rather than a hinderance to acquisition.
Returning to the issue of morphological congruency for the plural -S morpheme in English, Wen et al. (2010) identified several possible issues of Jiang(2004; 2007) which Jiang et al. (2011) was based. First, they noted that the method to measure the participants’ English proficiency might have been problematic such that Jiang’s participants might not actually have been advanced English speakers. Wen et al. (2010) speculated that the issue of number agreement
sensitivity in English by Chinese and Japanese ESL learners might be limited toadvanced learners of English. When classifying the participants’ English ability,
Jiang used TOEFL scores and self-assessments of English knowledge to categorize participants into an advanced group. Wen et al. (2010) instead insisted thatinternal tests should be used to classify participants by their English proficiency
because they are a more accurate representation of English knowledge thanself-assessment. Proficiency is without a doubt an important factor when determining if second language learners will show sensitivity to violations in the L2
grammar, therefore it is necessary to confirm the proficiency of the ESL learners.
Sagarra and Herschensohn (2011) demonstrated the effects of proficiency
among Spanish language learners coming from a non-gender language background. They found that intermediate learners were sensitive to violations ofgender in Spanish, while beginners had no such effect. Consequently, having
accurate categories of group proficiency might have relevance to the investigation of morphological incongruence. Furthermore, Wen et al.’s (2010) claim
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would suggest that only advanced learners of English from a morphological incongruent language can acquire the plural -S morpheme in English.
The second issue that Wen et al. (2010) note about Jiang (2004) is the lack ofadjacency between the quantifier and target noun in the partitive structure. As
such, they believed that the lack of significance observed in earlier studies mightreflect the limitations in working memory by L2 speakers rather than a lack ofgrammatical sensitivity. The difficulties of long-distance dependencies for L2
speakers are well known. For example, Keating (2009) using eye-tracking foundthat nonadjacent gender dependencies are not easily noticed by learners of
Spanish, whereas adjacent gender disagreements results in inflated reading
times. Moreover, as argued by the shallow structure hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b), dependencies that are structurally distant cannot be fully
processed by second language learners. In fact, even for native speakers, a nonlocal dependency is thought to incur a processing cost in relation to a more local
dependency (Gibson, 2000). Accordingly, a reasonable argument would be that
number agreement between long-distant dependencies might be especially difficult for L2 speakers.
Wen et al. (2010) addressed both of these issues in their self-paced reading
study which investigated Chinese and Japanese ESL learners’ sensitivity to theplural -S morpheme. Instead of relying on TOEFL scores and self-assessment
ratings, Wen et al. classified their ESL participants into intermediate and advanced groups using a C-test. Moreover, the structural and linear distance between the noun and its quantifier was reduced, thus providing a better opportunity for ESL speakers to notice the violations. Instead of using partitive structures, Wen et al. (2010) instead relied on simple demonstrative phrases. In contrast to Jiang (2004, 2007) and Jiang et al. (2011), they also investigated conditions with an ungrammatical plural -S as in (4b).
(4a) Singular-Grammatical
Jill sold this beautiful house to her niece every evening.
(4b) Plural-Ungrammatical*Jill sold this beautiful houses to her niece every evening.
(4c) Plural-Grammatical
Jill sold these beautiful houses to her niece every evening.
(4d) Singular-Ungrammatical*Jill sold these beautiful house to her niece every evening.
Wen et al. (2010) found that their advanced Chinese and Japanese ESL learners had increased response times for the violations in number agreement forsentences (4b) and (4d) in comparison to their grammatical counterparts, i.e.,
native-like behavior. In contrast, their intermediate group were instead observed
to be insensitive to the ungrammatical conditions. Their finding reveals that
Chinese and Japanese speakers learning English can acquire plural morphemes
in English on an implicit level which directly challenges Jiang’s (2004, 2007) andJiang et al.’s (2011) claim. This would suggest that a Japanese ESL learner would
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show sensitivity to plural -S once they have acquired the morpheme rule. As aresult, any error in spontaneous speech by these advanced learners might reflecta performance deficiency.
Song (2015) reinvestigated the issue combining the designs of Jiang et al.
(2011) and Wen et al. (2010). Using both partitive structures and demonstratives, Song tested advanced Korean ESL learners’ sensitivity to the plural -Smorpheme in English. However, unlike Wen et al. (2010), Song did not test intermediate learners and did not use items containing an ungrammatical pluralmorpheme.
(6a) Simple Plural-Grammatical
Kevin memorized those long Latin words in just ten seconds.
(6b) Simple Singular-Ungrammatical*Kevin memorized those long Latin word in just ten seconds.
(6c) Partitive Plural-Grammatical
Mary donated many of her books to the public library.
(6d) Partitive Singular-Ungrammatical*Mary donated many of her book to the public library.
Also using self-paced reading, Song found that these Korean ESL learners
were sensitive to violations in number agreement for both structure types, similar to the native English baseline. A key aspect of this study was that the items
also contained non-adjacent dependencies between the quantifier and target
noun. As such, Song’s study revealed that for learners whose L1 has an incongruent morpheme to the target L2 language, native-like processing is feasible
even for nonlocal dependencies.
We, however, find issue in the above studies in that they either support or refute the morphological congruency hypothesis using participants they argue tobe advanced ESL learners. Especially, Wen et al.’s (2010) and Song’s (2015) claimthat intermediate ESL learners should not be sensitive to number morphemes inEnglish might be problematic. Succinctly put, neither study’s results should relate to the general population of their participants. This is because the averagelearner would prospectively be a non-advanced English learner and would have
had limited exposure to natural or native-like English. While it is important tovalidate whether ultimate attainment of an incongruent morpheme is feasible
and advanced ESL learners would surely provide the best opportunity to investigate this issue, we believe that investigating an intermediate learner in Japan
would have intrinsic benefits to understanding the process of acquisition for amorphological incongruent category in the L2. This is because many Japanese
students are intermediate, especially among university students in Japan. Simply,
it is now known that despite morphological incongruence, learners potentiallycan acquire the new morpheme category and that having a morphological congruent category benefits the acquisition of the L2 morpheme. In other words,
while morphological incongruence may impose greater limitations for a specificlearner group, it does not necessarily prevent acquisition. However, previous
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studies are limited such that their results are not applicable to the EFL context.
Consequently, it is empirically important to retest this issue using an intermediate EFL group to determine if advanced proficiency and native like exposure
or prerequisites to attain an incongruent morpheme in the L2, the purpose of thecurrent study.

1.4. Current Study
The current study reinvestigates the issue of morphological incongruence between L1 and L2 morphological categories, specifically, whether JEFL learners
are sensitive to the null and plural number morphemes in English. While previous studies have relied heavily on the self-paced reading method, the current
study instead utilizes a new and emerging method to capture online sentence
processing, the Lexical Maze Task (Forster, 2010). In contrast with previous studies, the current study does not aim to investigate the processing by advanced
ESL speakers and instead aims to reveal sensitivity to violations in number
agreement by typical EFL speakers in Japan.

2. Experiment2.1. Participants
Fifty-three native-speaking Japanese learners of English were recruited from
Nagoya University in Japan. However, one participant was eliminated from theanalysis for not following the task procedure (N = 52, Female = 19). All participants were students of the university at the time of the study. All signed informed consent prior to the experiment and were compensated for their participation. Because most of the participants were first year undergraduate students
at the same university, the group’s factors were relatively homogeneous. Ages
ranged from 18.3 years of age to 26.3 years with a mean of 19.4 years. The periodof their English learning ranged from 6 years to 15 years of approximate years ofEnglish learning with the mean period of English learning being 7.7 years. Only
5 of the 52 participants had lived in an English-speaking country for a period
longer than 1 month and did not exceed 6 months. According to the averagemeans, these Japanese learners of English should be denoted as English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and not English as second language (ESL) living inJapan (JEFL/JESL).
At National Universities in Japan, there is a section on the entrance examinations for English. All participants recruited had passed this examination andwere not currently enrolled in remedial English classes. It is important to note,that despite the high value placed on English education in Japan, this is often limited to English education for the purpose of entering a University or
job-hunting rather than for communicable proficiency. As such, we estimatethat these participants at the very least had basic knowledge of the English language and were not likely to have high proficiency in English outside the scopeof grammar and reading. Because most of our first-year students at Nagoya
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University had not taken the TOEIC or the TOEFL test prior to the experiment,these measures were not recorded because they were simply not available. Instead, we conducted a short online English test to gauge participants basic English lexical knowledge. It is important to note that this test only measured approximate English knowledge. The online test was composed of 25 questions
and each question was weighted as a single point. The mean score was 15.2
points, ranging from 8 points to 19 points. Because no participant scored higher
than 19 points and had limited exposure to native-like English, we estimate thatthe majority of the participants had intermediate L2 English ability.
In comparison with Jiang (2004, 2007), Jiang et al. (2011), Song (2015) andWen et al. (2010), this study does not have a concrete advanced learner groupand is not an ESL study. Instead, these learners might be closer to an approximate intermediate EFL learner group. As such, these learners are closer to thegeneral population of JEFL learners in comparison to advanced JESL learners.

2.2. Materials
The experimental stimuli were created in a 2 (Grammaticality: Grammatical vs.
Ungrammatical) x 2 (Number: Singular vs. Plural) design: this dog, these *dog,
these dogs, this *dogs. Importantly, the items were not classified by the numerical quantifier (i.e., the demonstrative) preceding the noun such that all nouns
following “this” would be denoted as singular or plural for “these”. Instead, thenumerical value of the noun was determined by the presence or absence of theplural -S morpheme, and grammaticality was determined by whether the numerical value of the morpheme agreed with the demonstrative. See below for an
example of the four conditions for a single stimulus item.
(7a) Grammatical Singular (Null)
The chef bought this apple for the pie.
(7b) Ungrammatical Singular (Null)
The chef bought these apple for the pie.
(7c) Grammatical Plural (-S)
The chef bought these apples for the pie.
(7d) Ungrammatical Plural (-S)
The chef bought this apples for the pie.
In total, 40 experimental items were created in a counter-balanced design suchthat each participant would only see one version of each item for their experimental session. Additionally, half of the items contained the target noun at the
fifth region or word of the sentence and the other half contained it at the second
word. This was to ensure participants could not easily predict a locus of ungrammaticality. The length of the sentences was controlled by this designation.
For items containing the target noun at the second region, six words were used.
For sentences with the target at the fifth region, eight words were used. All target
nouns used contained regular morphology. Target noun frequency and length
were both controlled. The frequencies of the experimental target words weretaken from The SUBTL Word Frequency Database (Brysbaert & New, 2009). For
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the lexical maze task, all nonwords were taken from the ARC Nonword Database(Rastle, Harrington, & Coltheart, 2002), and all nonwords matched the length of
the target word. For plural target nouns, an additional-S was added to the nonword. Prior to the experimental proper, four practice items were given. All practice items were grammatical sentences.
The above items differ from Jiang et al. (2011) and Song (2015) such that nopartitive constructions were used (i.e., many of the apples). While the current
study utilized the strategy of using the demonstrative “this” and “these” to denote quantity, the current study differs from Song (2015) and Wen et al. (2010)
such that the target noun was directly adjacent to the quantifier region. This wasto ensure the best possible chance for the JEFL learners to detect the error in
number agreement.

2.3. Apparatus and Procedure
Participants were seated in front of a 60 Hz 15.6 LED laptop screen, attachedwith a CHRONOS response box (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA).
The stimuli and response times were presented and recorded by E-PRIME 3.0(Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA), presented on a white screen using
size 40 Courier New font.
Participants were instructed that they would be participating in a lexical mazetask, an enhanced lexical decision task which also measures the incremental
processing of a sentence (Forster, 2010). This task is thought to improve on the
self-paced reading method as it allows for a more localized measure ofprocessing and does not require the added use of comprehension questions.
Thus, participants read a sentence via the successful completion of a series oflexical decisions. Two words were displayed on the screen at a time, one at thecenter-left and the other at the center-right (internally randomized). However,
only one word was a permissible English word with the other being a nonword.
Each word of the sentence was displayed in sequential order and each word waspaired with a non-word; yet, the first word of the sentence was always pairedwith ++++ to indicate the start of a new trial item. To complete the task andform a sentence, the participant was required to correctly select each word of thetrial by pressing corresponding buttons on the button box. If they made a mistake at any point in the trial, the trial was immediately stopped, and the next trial
would subsequently begin after an onscreen message which displayed this information. See Figure 1 for an example of the procedure.
Before starting the experiment proper, four practice items were provided tofamiliarize the participant to the experiment protocol. After the completion of
the practice, participants were then given the opportunity to ask questions concerning the procedure. The experiment took approximately 15 - 20 minutes tocomplete. After the completion of the experiment, participants took a rest before
starting the online English test which took approximately 10 - 20 minutes tocomplete.
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Figure 1. Lexical maze task procedure.

2.4. Analytical Methods
The results were analyzed using linear mixed effect (LME) modelling (Baayen,Davidson, & Bates, 2008) within R (R Core Team, 2017). The lme 4 package(Bates, Mächler, Bolker, & Walker, 2014) was used for the LME analysis, thelmer Test package (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2017) was used toprovide models with p-values using Satterthwaite’s approximation for the degrees of freedom, the package LMERC onvenience Functions was used for thewithin-model data trimming, the package effects (Fox, Weisberg, Friendly,
Hong, Andersen, Firth, & Taylor, 2018) was used for the plots, and the package

emmeans (Lenth, Singmann, Love, Buerkner, & Herve, 2018) was used to calculate the estimated adjusted means of the LME model.
The fixed effects were comprised of the factors Grammaticality, Morpheme,
Proficiency, Trial Order, Item Frequency and Item Length. The random effects
were comprised of Subject and Item, consisting of both random intercepts andslopes. Sum contrast coding was used to obtain the main effects for each factor.
For Grammaticality, the condition Grammatical was coded as −0.5 and Ungrammatical was coded as 0.5. Similarly, for Morpheme, Null (i.e., singular) wascoded as −0.5 and Plural (i.e., plural -S) was coded as 0.5. Proficiency, Trial Order, Item Frequency and Item Length were all coded as continuous factors, andthey were all transformed using natural logarithm, centered and then standardized prior to the analysis. Using a Box-Cox analysis, it was found that the natural logarithm transformation was ideal for the response times.
Prior to the analysis, any item with an incorrect response prior to the target
item was eliminated from the data set. Following this, all items with impossible
response times for the target item were eliminated: below 200 ms and above
5000 ms. This collectively removed 142 data points (6.82%) from the set. Dataoutliers were trimmed based upon ±2.5 standard deviations of the estimatesfrom the model. This eliminated 33 data points (1.70%) from the set.
Considering that the participants performed near ceiling level and errors were
distributed approximately equally among conditions, an analysis for item accuracy was not conducted. As such, only response times at the target noun was explored.

2.5. Results
The estimated means and LME results are displayed in Table 1 and Table 2 below. Plots of the response times are shown in Figures 2-5.
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Table 1. Estimated means.
EffectCondition

MeansStandard Error

Grammatical

7.012

0.034

Ungrammatical

7.030

0.035

Null (dog)

7.003

0.034

Plural (dogs)

7.039

0.037

Grammatical Null (this dog)

6.989

0.033

Ungrammaical Null (these *dog)

7.017

0.036

Grammatical Plural (these dogs)

7.035

0.039

Ungrammatical Plural (this *dogs)

7.043

0.037

Grammaticality

Morpheme

Interaction

Note. Estimated means are generated from the LME model.

Table 2. Linear mixed effect model.
EffectEstimateSEdf

t valuep value

Grammaticality

0.028

0.012

73

2.314

0.023*Morpheme

0.045

0.020

106

2.230

0.028*

Proficiency.z−0.0620.025

51−2.4650.017*

Trial.Z−0.017

0.006

1807

−2.8480.004**

Frequency.z−0.0790.024

42−3.2490.002**

Length.z

0.073

0.024

51

2.969

0.005**

Grammaticality: Morpheme−0.0210.025

84−0.822

0.413

Grammaticality: Proficiency.z−0.0280.012

75−2.31070.024*Morpheme: Proficiency.z−0.0010.013

72−0.115

0.909

Gramm: Morph:Prof.z

0.072

0.025

87

2.847

0.006**

Figure 2. Grammaticality and Morpheme effect charts.
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Figure 3. Grammaticality: Morpheme effect plot.

Figure 4. Grammaticality: Proficiency.z effect plot.

The results revealed that for the condition Grammaticality, ungrammaticaltarget items (i.e., this *dogs & these *dog) had significantly longer response
times in comparison to grammatical ones (i.e., this dog & these dogs), p =0.0235. For the condition Morpheme, items containing the plural -S morpheme
were shown to take longer to respond to than the singular null morpheme, p =0.028. It is important to note, however, that this might not likely relate to the increased character length as Length.z was used to adjust the estimated means of
the model and was found to be significant, p = 0.005. One possibility is that theovert plural morpheme encompasses additional processing work. This might include the morphological decomposition of the morpheme and the processing of
the root word or the triggering to check the number agreement between morpheme and the preceding quantifier.
The Frequency.z of target word was found to significantly alter response times
such that items with higher frequencies had shorter response times than those
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Figure 5. Grammaticality: Morpheme: Proficiency.z effect plot.

with low frequencies, p = 0.002. The fixed factor Trial.z was also shown to havesignificant differences in response time such that participants became faster intheir responses as their experimental session continued, p = 0.004. The factor
Proficiency.z also revealed significant differences among participants, p = 0.002.
Despite the simplicity of the online test, participants who answered more accurately were able to respond faster at the target word than those with lower
scores.
Moving on to interaction effects, it was shown that interaction between the
Grammaticality and Morpheme factors was not significant, p = 0.413. Thus, thissuggests that both the differences between “this dog” vs. “these *dog” and “thesedogs” vs. “this *dogs” had approximate effects for both variables. Also, the interaction between Morpheme and Proficiency.z was not significant, p = 0.909.
Therefore, regardless of English proficiency, participants had approximate behavioral reactions to the presence and absence of the English plural -S morpheme.
Importantly, the interaction between Grammaticality and Proficiency.z was
significant, p = 0.024. Looking at Figure 4, response time differences within
Grammaticality only manifested when participants had higher English proficiency. Accordingly, this interaction effect demonstrates that at some level, having a high English proficiency is crucial for the sensitivity to violations in number agreement.
However, this interpretation might be problematic as the three-way interaction of Grammaticality, Morpheme and Proficiency.z was also significance, p =0.006, which revealed counterintuitive findings. Looking at the plot in Figure 5,for items with the plural -S suffixed, the above finding was still accurate. Specifically, participants with higher English proficiency were sensitive to the violationof “this *dogs”, and participants with lower English proficiency did not reveal
substantial differences between conditions. In contrast, when looking at the null
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morpheme conditions, the opposite pattern was observed. For the items “thisdog” and “these *dog”, participants with low English proficiency were sensitive
to the ungrammatical usage of the null morpheme in “these *dog”. Yet, this sensitivity diminished as proficiency increased. Interestingly, in Jiang et al. (2011)
and Song (2015), the only ungrammatical items used were those whose target
noun ungrammaticality utilized the null morpheme.

3. Discussion
This study set out to investigate the sensitivity of the English null and plural
number morphemes by Japanese learners of English living in Japan. Specifically,
we aimed to determine the representation for numerical inflectional morphology
JEFL learners have during online processing. The results indicated that JEFL
learners are sensitive to the disagreement in number agreement between feature-checking dependencies supporting the findings of Song (2015) and Wen etal. (2010) and refuting the claims of the morphological congruency hypothesis(Jiang et al., 2011). Furthermore, the results demonstrated that having an advanced English proficiency is not necessarily a prerequisite for native-like performance. For both the ungrammatical singular (i.e., these *dog) and plural (i.e.,
this *dogs) items, the JEFL participants revealed increased response times incomparison to their grammatical counterparts. However, further investigation
revealed that this effect was modulated by proficiency such that participants withhigher proficiency were more sensitive ungrammatical inflections. Yet, this wasshown to be only true for ungrammatical plural nouns, and in contrast, participants with lower English proficiency had greater sensitivity to the ungrammatical null inflection. These points will be discussed in the following subsections.

3.1. The Processing of the Morphemes
The results of this study effectively demonstrated that Japanese ESL learners
showed sensitivity to the plural -S morpheme. The plural morphology, however,elicited a processing cost despite the response times being adjusted within themodel, thus indicating that there is a behavioral response to plural morphology
regardless of its grammaticality. This is similar with Jiang (2004) who also foundthat grammatical plural nouns can elicit increased response times using
self-paced reading. As Jiang noted, while there is an obvious difference in length
between a grammatical plural item and its ungrammatical singular counterpart,
this effect might not originate from item length. While Wen et al. (2010) andSong (2015) both used residual response times factoring out the factor of word
length (see Ferreira & Clifton, 1986), it does not appear Jiang (2004) took suchan approach. As such, this difference might not have been found if adjusted or
residual response times were instead used in Jiang’s study.
Instead of discounting the differences found in length, we contend that these
JEFL learners might have been undergoing the processing of morphological decomposition. Therefore, participants processed the morpheme separately from
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the root noun, i.e., two separate units were being processed. If these Japaneseparticipants utilized a mechanism to process a plural morpheme separately andincrementally in English, an extra unit of morphology should take longer toprocess than a null value.
It is possible that that at this stage of L2 acquisition, the learners could nottake full advantage of morphological decomposition (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a,
2006b; Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997) which resulted in additional
processing costs for the inflectional morphology prior to the checking of number
agreement. Portin and Laine (2001) and Portin, Lehtonen, and Laine (2007) argued that their Swedish-Finnish bilinguals had developed a reading strategy thatcaused inflectional morphology to be processed longer than a full-set reading.
Portin and Laine (2001) proposed that other bilinguals might use a similar
strategy. Because we contend that the presence of plural morpheme does not
originate from length alone, this would be a more favorable proposition for the
inflectional morphology processing by JEFL learners in the current study.
For the processing of a null morpheme, L2 learners might have deficits detecting a null morpheme due limited perceptual salience of the phonologicallyabsent morpheme. Accordingly, it should be challenging for JEFL learners toprocess and assign a numerical value based from it (Goldschneider & DeKeyser,
2001; Jiang, 2007). As stated, in English the null form denotes singularity for
regular nouns whereas it is undifferentiated between plurality and singularity inJapanese. Accordingly, it would not be unreasonable to assume that JEFL learners might be improperly applying L1 Japanese morphosyntactic rules for nullmorphology on to L2 English morphemes.
As a result, there might be two probable scenarios for their processing of nullmorphology. They either (1) process the null morpheme but fail to correctly assign it as singular due to L1 transfer or (2) they might fail to detect it. However,the later possibility seems to be inaccurate because participants revealed sensitivity to an ungrammatical null morpheme (these *dog). Despite this sensitivity,
the first possibility might nonetheless be partially accurate. Looking at Figure 3,
the difference between the grammatical null condition and ungrammatical condition appears to be less than the difference between the grammatical null condition and the ungrammatical plural. A similar numerical difference was also
found in Wen et al. (2010) for the same conditions. Considering that the intended numerical assignment for the ungrammatical plural would be a nullmorpheme as indicated by the determiner, it appears that detecting the violationin number agreement might be easier for JEFL learners when there is overt
morphology.
Accounts of SLA theory that would agree with the above results is lexical variability (Hopp, 2016) and the missing surface inflection hypothesis (Prévost &White, 2000). Because learners might suffer from real-time processing demands,
they might have ultimately over-relied on the default null form when movingfrom the quantifier to the ungrammatical target noun. In tandem, because theselearners in general would be suspect to have greater lexical variability for plural
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nouns (i.e., these dogs & these *dog are relatively acceptable due to their prevalence in L2 speech), there would be less predictability for a plural target appearing after a plural quantifier. However, Prévost and White’s (2000) hypothesis
would posit that these L2 learners are not suspected to have lexical variability for
singular nouns (e.g., this dog). As such, there should be greater predictability fora nominal with null number marking.
In fact, the ungrammatical plural noun (e.g., this *dogs) having the longest
response times agrees with aspects of the morphological congruency hypothesis(Jiang et al., 2011) as well. While it is incorrect in the argument that ultimate attainment is not possible, it might find support in the argument that the congruent feature shared between the languages (i.e., a singular noun within the scopeof a singular quantifier is not permitted to have a plural morpheme) evoked thegreatest response among the conditions. This finding is congruent with the studies of Gillon-Dowens et al. (2010) and Gillon-Dowens et al. (2011) who foundincreased sensitivity among L1 English learners of L2 Spanish for number
agreement in comparison to gender agreement and L1 Chinese learners of L2
Spanish. These collective results indicate that when an aspect of a morphologicalcategory is congruent, there should enhanced sensitivity to its violation. However, one counter argument to this is that the plural morpheme is perceptually salient while the null morpheme is not. As such, the enhanced sensitivity to thisviolation may instead reflect the degree of salience.
In summary, regardless of the approach, it is possible that detecting violations
in agreement between null and a quantifier is difficult for JEFL learners. However, this argument becomes problematic when considering the interaction of proficiency with the grammaticality of the null morpheme, which will be discussed
below. In the following section, we will describe how the above findings relate to
English proficiency and the English learning context.

3.2. ESL vs. EFL and Proficiency
Looking at Figure 4, it can be seen that participants with increased English ability
not only had faster response times but ultimately revealed differences between
Grammatical and Ungrammatical conditions. This finding would support theprevious claims of Song (2015) and Wen et al. (2010) that sensitivity to an incongruent morpheme might be limited to those with higher L2 ability. While
this is a reasonable and attractive argument, the argument begins to fail once theinteraction between grammaticality, morpheme and proficiency is taken into
account.
Interestingly, looking at Figure 5, the more proficient participants in thisstudy did not reveal native-like behavior for ungrammatical null inflections denoting singularity. In fact, it seems participants with lower proficiency weremore native-like in this regard. While we cannot offer conclusive rational for
this, we do provide several possibilities.
One possibility is that as proficiency increased for JEFL learners, their lexical
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variability also increased. Lexical variability has been addressed as a crucial factor for both L1 and L2 processing (Hopp, 2016; Prévost & White, 2000). Succinctly put, for L2 speakers, as they are exposed to more errors for feature-checking dependencies, their sensitivity to these errors are attenuated. Thisis explained as their lexicon accounting for the variability in the exposure to andproduction of ungrammatical morphemes. According to learners’ error corpora(Tono, 2000, 2009), Japanese learners of English produce a substantial amountof null-inflection errors (e.g., these *dog). Accordingly, it may be a reasonable
inference that learners more engrossed in the English learning process would
both produce and be exposed to these errors at a higher rate than learners withlow English proficiency. While this is speculative, it might be the case that JEFL
learners lose their sensitivity to ungrammatical null morphology over their English learning process in Japan.
This line of reasoning also provides further insight into previous studies. In
both Wen et al. (2010) and Song (2015), advanced ESL participants were recruited. Moreover, in Wen et al. (2010), the advanced group had native-like behavior while the intermediate group did not. Considering that advanced ESL
learners would be more likely to have higher exposure to native-English, the distribution of grammatical and ungrammatical exposure to errors might readjust
itself to a native-like setting, thus allowing the sensitivity of errors to be observed. However, to confirm this suspicion, future studies should explore thelongitudinal performance of either L1 Chinese, Korean or Japanese speakers
starting from an EFL environment and moving to an ESL setting to determine
the degree proficiency and ESL exposure benefits the online processing of incongruent morphological categories.

4. Conclusion
Despite Japanese learners of English having been previously thought to be unable to acquire the plural -S morpheme in English, this study effectively reveals
that these learners have sensitivity to violations in number agreement for bothplural -S and the singular null form, replicating recent research. Importantly,
because these learners had limited exposure to native-like English, this study
demonstrates that neither living in an English-speaking country nor having highor communicable proficiency is required for the behavioral arousal to an ungrammatical incongruent morpheme. Thus, this study casts doubt on the morphological congruency hypothesis in the specific regards that sensitivity to theseerrors should not be observed. However, we do believe that morphological incongruence does play an important role for the acquisition of a morphologicalcategory in a second language such that congruency may benefit the acquisition
process. Overall, this study supports the missing surface inflection hypothesis(Prévost & White, 2000) in regard to JEFL learners being able to acquire theplural inflections in English. Regarding language instruction, while instructors
should be aware that errors are not necessarily a representation of a learner’s
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grammaticized knowledge, errors produced can increase the lexical variability
among learners thus exacerbating the issue. As such, we believe that these errors
should not be ignored, and that nativelike-exposure can facilitate the process of
eliminating these performance errors.

Acknowledgements
This study was funded in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS) Grand-In-Aid for Overseas JSPS post-doctoral research fellows granted toMichael P. Mansbridge, Grant Number P18004. We would like to thank Dr. Rinus G. Verdonschot of Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan for his advice
during the programming of the E-Prime experiment.

Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

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