Microvariation in L2 acquisition of backward anaphora: Mandarin versus Japanese

Abstract There are crosslinguistic variations for backward anaphora coreference readings although the languages, such as English, Italian, Russian, and Mandarin, that have been experimentally studied are constrained by Principle C. English allows backward anaphora coreference readings between the pronoun and the antecedent NP for sentences like “While he was dancing, Kermit ate the pizza”, but languages like Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese prohibit the coreference readings for some types of temporal subordinate clauses. In addition to the macrovariation between the English type of languages versus the Russian/Mandarin/Japanese type of languages, a microvariation exists between Mandarin and Japanese. Due to idiosyncratic constraints in Mandarin, the acceptance rate for the coreference reading in sentences with the ‘because’ clause was substantially lower in Mandarin than in Japanese. In this study, we report findings from an experiment on bi-directional L2 acquisition of backward anaphora between Mandarin and Japanese which demonstrate similar mechanisms underlying both macrovariation and microvariation for pronoun resolution of backward anaphora sentences.