This paper assesses the last two-decade studies of null arguments in East Asian languages. Unlike the predecessors, these studies have concentrated lopsidedly on the distribution of null arguments in VP/TP ellipsis or anaphora contexts, thus hampering the proper identification of null arguments in these languages. Grounded on the observation that null arguments cannot be used as indefinites in radically pro-drop languages (Holmberg 2016), we go on to note that in non-ellipsis or non-anaphora contexts, null arguments in East Asian languages are either unique weak or anaphoric strong definites. Particularly, the latter use of null arguments sheds new lights on accounting for the long-standing puzzles such as Huang’s (1984) paradigm in Mandarin Chinese and Abe’s (2009, 2014) paradigm in Japanese, on top of the sundry distributions of null arguments in Korean. We suggest that null arguments in VP/TP ellipsis or anaphora contexts in East Asian languages can receive a proper analysis based on their syntactic identity in non-ellipsis or non-anaphora contexts.

Recent studies on sentence processing show that late learners of a second or foreign language, those who begin learning after puberty, differ from native speakers (and early L2 learners) as to how they comprehend complex sentences in real time. One construction in which this difference has been discovered is in the processing of non-local dependencies where constituents are displaced, such as in sentences containing wh-dependencies: The nurse who the doctor argued that the rude patient had angered ___ is refusing to work late. This paper presents a brief overview of recent findings investigating this issue. To this end, differences and similarities between L1 and L2 speakers in employing lexical and syntactic information to resolve these types of dependencies are discussed. In particular, the L2 learners appear to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategoriser, without postulating an intermediate gap position. Our result is argued to render support to the hypothesis that L2 learners under-use syntactic information in L2 processing, which causes them difficulty in processing the L2 input in a native-like fashion.

To examine morphological processing of past tense in English, we set up an ERP-based experiment where the participants read stem forms of regular and irregular verbs presented by using the repetition priming paradigm: the stem forms were either preceded by their past tense forms (primed condition: walked-walk, hold-held) or by their past tense forms of unrelated verbs (unprimed condition: stayed-walk, taught-held). The difference in ERP responses between the primed and unprimed stems was taken as showing morphological priming effects. In the previous studies (e.g., Münte et al. (1999)), native speakers of English elicited the reduced N400 in regular verbs, but not in irregular verbs. However, this study found an N400 reduction in the primed condition in both regular and irregular verbs. The reduced N400 effects were also manifested in control conditions: phonological words and the regular nonce verbs. These effects show that Korean L2 learners process regular and irregular forms in an identical way, whereas native speakers processed regular and irregular forms using a dual route reported in the previous studies. To conclude, Korean L2 learners do not process morphologically as native speakers do. There are some factors that affect L2 processing. First, L1 speakers use grammatical (=morphological/syntactic) information in language processing, but L2 learners do not. According to Clahsen and Felser (2006), L2 learners' grammatical processing capacity is limited. Second, L1 is acquired implicitly by children, but L2 is learned explicitly in formal classrooms. Finally, with maturational changes, late L2 learners use a declarative memory system rather than a procedure memory system in L2 grammatical processing.

This paper examines non-default/default case environments in English and explores the nature of default case and its realization mechanism in this language. We advance four claims about the default case licensing mechanism: (ⅰ) The default case mechanism is capitalized on to spell out nominal expressions whose Case feature fails to be valued because of the deficiency of the Case value-licensing head, (ⅱ) Nominal expressions without Case valuation have case form through default case licensing at the morphological/phonological component, (ⅲ) Both Nominative and Accusative case can be default case in English, (ⅳ) The selection of the particular Case value through the default case mechanism depends on several factors such as relative positions of nominal expressions and the invariant strong form constraint (Quinn 2002).