Second language acquisition of English plurals by Chinese learners

Previous research supported the proposal that multiplicity inferences (i.e., the more than one interpretation) associated with English plural morphology are scalar implicatures (Tieu et al., 2014). The current study extends the research to second language (L2) acquisition by testing Chinese-speaking learners of English. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) adapted from Tieu et al. (2014), we compared the interpretations of English bare plurals among Chinese adult learners and native English speakers. Results indicate that the interpretive pattern of Chinese learners closely aligns with that of the English controls’. This supports the universality of scalar implicatures in L2 and does not provide direct evidence for L1 transfer through morpheme mapping from English plural morpheme -s to Chinese plural morpheme -men.