L2 English Learners’ Acquisition Of The Count/Mass Nouns

The distinction between mass nouns and count nouns has always been a hot topic in ESL(English as a second language)research.Atomicity has been considered a key concept in distinguishing count nouns from mass nouns.Many studies have focused on Korean speakers,whose language has classifiers and plural markers.There is little research on the ESL learners,whose language has both obligatory plural markers and atomic mass nouns.Since Russian has the same obligatory plural marking and atomic mass nouns as English,we conducted this study to investigate the characteristics of Russian learners’ acquisition of English count/mass noun distinction.There are three research questions: 1)what is the pattern of L1-Russian speakers using the plural marker with count nouns and mass nouns in English? 2)What is the difference in the acquisition of the English count/mass distinction between Russian learners and Chinese learners? 3)Whether speakers of a plural-marking,non-classifier language acquiring another plural-marking language(e.g.,L1-Russian L2-English learners)would be influenced by the semantic universal of atomicity,or would transfer the plural-marking system from their L1?This study consisted of two tasks: The English grammaticality judgement task and English proficiency test.Totally,34 Russian learners of English participated in the study.In order to ensure the reliability and effectiveness of the experiment,we recruited 15 L1 Chinese subjects as the control group.Results showed that 1)Russian learners of English accurately used the plural marker-s with count nouns;moreover,the mass atomic nouns and mass non-atomic nouns did not exhibit significant overuse of-s.2)For Russian learners of English,concreteness had a significant effect;there was an interaction between countability and concreteness.For Chinese learners of English,the concreteness effect was not significant.There was no interaction between countability and concreteness.Additionally,in mass atomic and non-atomic categories,the application of-s by Chinese learners of English was more frequent than that of Russian learners of English,indicating that atomicity did not affect both groups of learners in the same manner.3)Russian learners of English transferred the plural-marking features from their L1,which suggested that direct L1-transfer overrode atomicity to some extent.