Not all cues are equal: Cue reliance during comprehension predicts spoken plural marking accuracy in L1-Chinese EFL learners

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>