2026-10-07T18:26:49Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33684886 2026-09-13T06:48:02Z category_29338 category_29392 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Not all cues are equal: Cue reliance during comprehension predicts spoken plural marking accuracy in L1-Chinese EFL learners Brian Rusk (24844603) English as a second language Applied linguistics and educational linguistics grammatical morphology number marking visual-world eye-tracking cue reliance dominance analysis <p dir="ltr">This study investigated whether L1-Chinese learners' comprehension of English number marking predicts their accuracy producing plural-marked count nouns in spoken English, and whether this depends on the cue relied upon. Participants (*N* = 74) completed a picture-description task and a visual-world eye-tracking task, with number-marked nouns presented under three sentence conditions: with bound morphology as the sole cue, with a co-occurring lexical quantifier, or with extended time to preview the visual context. Dominance analysis assessed picture-selection accuracy, looks-to-targets, and proficiency as predictors of plural marking. Comprehension of bound morphology as the sole cue completely dominated all other predictors, including proficiency, indicating that consistent processing of this cue alone predicts spoken accuracy. This suggests that what transfers from Chinese is a construction-level expectation that English noun phrases may be bare, rather than a failure to map number-marked forms to meanings.</p> 2026-09-13T06:48:02Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.33684886.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Not_all_cues_are_equal_Cue_reliance_during_comprehension_predicts_spoken_plural_marking_accuracy_in_L1-Chinese_EFL_learners/33684886 CC BY 4.0