This paper argues that L2 learners are strategic: they use their L1 grammar to optimize target-like production of codas and consonant-shaped inflectional morphology, when errors would not be detected by native speaker interlocutors. Study I examines production of inflectional s versus coda s in two groups of Mandarin-speaking learners of English. The ‘variable deletion’ group is strategic: they use their L1 representation for inflection when possible, enabling them to produce inflectional s half of the time. Both groups of learners consistently produce coda s in monomorphemic words. However, this does not help with the production of inflection for the less strategic ‘across-the-board deletion’ group, as this group has no means to represent and thus produce inflection with the grammar they have built for English. Studies II and III compare production of coda s and coda l in a Mandarin speaker with near-native proficiency in English and in a Burmese speaker with high-intermediate proficiency in English. Both studies show that L2 learners can be strategic, independent of proficiency level: they adapt the L1 grammar for coda s when repairs involving substitution or deletion would be detected by English-speaking interlocutors; they attend less to optimizing production when errors would be less costly, leading to substitution and deletion in the case of coda l. Study IV examines the production of word-final codas in a Japanese speaker with near-native proficiency in English. Japanese only permits placeless nasals in final position, whereas English permits a wide range of consonants. It is shown that learners can repurpose their L1 representation of word-medial geminates for final codas, leading to productions that appear to be on target for English, but instead employ strategies drawn from the L1 grammar.

The minimalist exploration of generative grammar requires that it simultaneously satisfy descriptive adequacy for particular grammars, explanatory adequacy for Universal Grammar (UG), and phylogenetic adequacy for the emergence of language in the course of evolution. The strong minimalist thesis (SMT), proposed in the search for “genuinely explanatory” theory that simultaneously satisfies these three conditions, has two roles: the disciplinary and the enabling functions (Chomsky, 2024). This paper provides an overview of the logic by which SMT is established and discusses how the enabling function of SMT, emphasized in recent years, provides a new way of looking at language.

Generative approaches to second language acquisition (GenSLA) are based on the research of Universal Grammar (UG). To the extent that UG is crystalized, GenSLA can contribute to SLA research. In the minimalist program seeking genuine explanations of linguistic phenomena, an overspecified UG with rich parameters postulated in the Principles-and-Parameters approach is no longer untenable in terms of learnability, evolvability and universality. This paper discusses the logical and developmental problems of SLA, considering the current state of affairs of the minimalist program. In particular, it summarizes Miyamoto et al. (2024), focusing on the SLA of operator features. The paper also demonstrates that the input violating structure dependence does not become intake in SLA, emphasizing a difference between input and intake.

The basic thesis of the dynamic model of language acquisition is that the course of language development and the outcome are “affected by the grammars at the non-initial stages of language development in a way that cannot be properly characterized in terms of the output-oriented theories” (Kajita, 1977, 2000). After the brief introduction of the fundamental claim of the dynamic approach, I present some examples of English and Japanese to show that initially unlikely syntactic constructions are made available by non-initial properties of the grammars. I also suggest that the dynamic approach can explain more adequately the cases of L2 learners' misuse. In particular, the dynamic model explains that L2 learners cannot use some discourse-related particles in earlier stages of L2 acquisition, even if their L1 grammar has the same property concerning the sentence-final discourse particles. More importantly, it also explains that they come to be able to use them properly at the subsequent stages earlier than the other learners whose L1 grammars do not contain the discourse-related particles.

Three experiments were conducted to determine the veracity of two separate approaches used to explain Scalar Implicature (SI) generation, namely, whether SIs arise as default inferences, or rather result from a pragmatic calculation based on context. Japanese second language (L2) learners of English were compared to first language (L1) English and Japanese speakers using the Truth Value Judgement Task (TVJT). While some previous observations showed L2 learners had no difficulty deriving SIs in TVJT, this study discovers L2 participants struggled more to generate SIs when confronted with quantifier most than when encountering quantifier some. This asymmetry of quantifier treatment was not observed in L1 participants. The asymmetry might not be surprising, given that, as often suggested in theoretical literature, most is semantically and morpho-syntactically more complex than some. The default lexical approach though still predicts L2 participants should have performed better at SI generation than our experiments found. The results also do not support the pragmatic approach, as there is no reason to believe under this view that L2 participants' performance generating SI should have differed between most and some. Through these results we suggest a third approach to SI generation, that is, SI is part of the lexical content attached to each quantifier but does not actually arise by default.

This study investigated how native speakers of Japanese (verb-framed language) and Chinese (satellite-framed leaning language) acquire narratives of motion events in L2 English (satellite-framed language). Focusing on manner salience, cause salience, path segments, path conflation, ground salience and scene-setting, this study examined the written narratives of motion events in English produced by native speakers of Japanese and Chinese, in comparison to native speakers of English. The results demonstrated both the transfer of and the restructuring of L1 motion events schemata in acquiring L2 narratives of motion events. More importantly, this study found that manner salience, cause salience and path conflation posed greater acquisition difficulty for L2 learners than the rest of the semantic components, which might be attributed to the different status of the semantic components in the schemata of motion events, as well as to the acquisition difficulty of the target linguistic structures absent in the source languages.

Since the 1970s, Overpassivization has long attracted the interest of many second language (L2) acquisition researchers who have claimed in the recent decade that subject animacy plays a key role in passive errors with unaccusatives―that is, Overpassivization occurs more frequently with inanimate subjects than with animate ones. While several researchers have widely espoused the analysis to account for Overpassivization, its predictions have rarely undergone critical examination. Hence, the present article focuses on Overpassivization and investigates its assumptions and predictions by analyzing the data available in the literature and additional data obtained from an L2 English learner corpus. It concludes that while subject animacy seems to initially influence Overpassivization, the subject animacy analysis, though appealing, is insufficient to fully explain Overpassivization. This study also suggests that agentivity, not animacy, matters to Overpassivization, providing evidence for this agentivity analysis from two previous studies.

This study explores the effect of typological proximity on the acquisition of a European language as a second (L2) or third (L3) language by East Asian first language (L1) speakers. Specifically, we investigate the acquisition of Spanish null objects and associated clitics by L1 Japanese speakers whose L2 is English and whose L3 is Spanish. While both Japanese and Spanish allow null objects, their typological proximity is more distant than that of Spanish and English (Miyamoto & Yamada, 2017), and English does not allow null objects. Spanish clitics are considered phi features, which are present in English but absent in Japanese. We hypothesize that Spanish clitics provide positive evidence for the acquisition of grammatical gender agreement, and the acquisition of Spanish null objects is a prerequisite for the acquisition of Spanish clitic. This study classified participants based on their English proficiency and administered an English grammaticality judgement task. After that, Spanish grammaticality judgment tasks were carried out as the main experiment. The results suggest that the effect of object related knowledge from L1 and L2 on L3 is complex, and the effect from participants' L1 Japanese is not eliminated. Participants showed difficulty in learning L3 Spanish clitics, which may be due to the difference in the feature configurations between their L2 English and L3 Spanish. Our findings do not support the acquisition order suggested in previous works, nor the models based solely on typological or syntactic proximity, and highlight the need for further investigation into the over-suppliance of phi features in L3 acquisition, that are not available in learners’ L1/L2, as well as the nature of the Spanish clitics.

VanPatten has pointed out that “Input Processing Strategies” can lead to erroneous semantic comprehension when used by learners whose sentence parsing skills are still developing (VanPatten, 2007). This study aimed to investigate whether these “Input Processing Strategies” actually cause errors in sentence comprehension among learners of Japanese. Among the various “Input Processing Strategies,” the “First Noun Principle” is the most referenced in Japanese language education research. Therefore, this study focuses on the “First Noun Principle,” specifically examining two grammars presumably using this principle, namely “temorau” and comparative adjective sentences among Thai learners of Japanese, to identify the factors influencing learners' sentence comprehension. Participants were divided into two groups: one group comprised 23 intermediate-level students and the other comprised 23 beginner-level students, both of whom took a sentence-comprehension test. The results of the study showed that the "First Noun Principle" does not affect sentence comprehension in any of the grammatical items. This suggests that sentence patterns extracted from the Japanese textbook used in the class, and grammatical processing strategies in the native language, may be the affecting factor. In addition, errors caused by sentence patterns extracted from biased inputs were found less likely to improve, compared to errors caused by native language grammatical processing strategies.