We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains ‘atoms’ or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic universal, atomicity holds across languages. However, the count/mass status of nouns may differ cross-linguistically. Our results, which show difficulty on atomic mass nouns in both learner groups, support an argument that atomicity is used as a semantic universal in the L2. Our results also suggest that both count/mass status in the L1 and word frequency in the L2 impact performance, suggesting roles for both L1 lexical transfer and lexical frequency. In addition, learners had better performance on abstract as opposed to concrete atomic mass nouns, providing evidence consistent with a theory of the accessibility of atoms.

我们通过检查英语的 L1-French 和 L1-Chinese 学习者来调查英语的第二语言 (L2) 学习者是否依赖第一语言 (L1) 迁移和原子性来获得计数/质量区别。原子性对名词是否包含“原子”或保留名词属性的最小元素进行编码。作为语义普遍性，原子性适用于各种语言。但是，名词的计数/质量状态可能会因跨语言而不同。我们的结果显示了两个学习者群体中原子质量名词的困难，支持原子性被用作 L2 中的语义普遍性的论点。我们的结果还表明，L1 中的计数/质量状态和 L2 中的词频都会影响性能，表明 L1 词汇转移和词汇频率的作用。此外，