Think of a number: conceptual transfer in the second language acquisition of English plural-marking

Dao (2007) found that Vietnamese learners of English produced numeric plurals (e.g. five books) before lexical plurals (e.g. books). Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998; 2005; 2007) predicts the reverse order, assuming that agreement requires a process of unification which involves the storage of information, while production of a single word does not. Using a model of lexical access, Weaver++ (Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer 1999) we show how (i) agreement can result from co-activation where two words simply respond to the same concept, so no information storage is involved and (ii) the pr... Mehr ...