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Previous studies on the acquisition of semantics in the aspectual domain have suggested that a difficult case for achieving a targetlike representation in a second language arises when learners need to preempt a first language (L1) option (Gabriele, 2009). This study investigates this issue by focusing on a learning scenario where predicate-level variability exists in the L1 input. We investigate whether Japanese learners of English can learn to invalidate event cancellation readings (Tsujimura, 2003) in English and how such knowledge develops with increasing English proficiency. We address these questions by examining how Japanese learners of English interpret accomplishment predicates that allow an event cancellation reading in Japanese but not in English. A truth-value judgment task was administered to 60 beginner, 96 intermediate, and 40 advanced Japanese learners of English as well as 20 L1 English and 20 L1 Japanese speakers. Our results showed that Japanese learners of English progressed toward a targetlike representation of aspectual entailment. We argue that such progress follows two parallel routes: a grammatical route rooted in the learners' growing awareness of the English determiner and number morphology combined with a statistical route rooted in the learners' inferences based on missing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man, across three age groups (5-6 years, 9-10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the man; Someone made the man laugh; Someone broke the truck; ?Someone made the truck break). The verb-semantics hypothesis predicts that, for all languages, by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by the extent to which the causing and caused event (e.g., amusing and laughing) merge conceptually into a single event (as rated by separate groups of adult participants). The entrenchment and preemption hypotheses predict, for all languages, that by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by, respectively, the verb's relative overall frequency, and frequency in nearly-synonymous constructions (e.g., X made Y laugh for *Someone laughed the man). Analysis using mixed effects models revealed that entrenchment/preemption effects (which could not be distinguished due to collinearity) were observed for all age groups and all languages except K'iche', which suffered from a thin corpus and showed only preemption sporadically. All languages showed effects of event-merge semantics, except K'iche' which showed only effects of supplementary semantic predictors. We end by presenting a computational model which successfully simulates this pattern of results in a single discriminative-learning mechanism, achieving by-verb correlations of around r = 0.75 with human judgment data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]