This paper presents an experimental study of the rarely explored question of how input through instruction interacts with L2 acquisition at the level of modular linguistic knowledge. The investigation focuses on L2 knowledge of the English polarity item "any," whose properties are only partially covered by typical language-teaching…

This article reports on an experimental investigation of knowledge of distributivity in nonnative (L2) Japanese learners whose first language (L1) is English or Korean. The availability of distributive scope in Japanese is modulated by word order and the semantic features of quantifiers. For English-speaking learners, these subtle interpretive…

In English and Chinese, questions with a "wh"-object and a universally quantified subject (e.g. "What did everyone buy?") allow an individual answer ("Everyone bought apples.") and a pair-list answer ("Sam bought apples, Jo bought bananas, Sally bought..."). By contrast, the pair-list answer is reportedly unavailable in Japanese and Korean. This…