ABSTRACT
Participants’ L1s strongly differ in their degree of morphological richnessthe most important typological property of a language (Dressler, 2004). The level of morphological richness refers to the number of functions that are expressed through morphological means. For example, languages that mark the contrast singular/plural through word-internal elements (affixes) are morphologically richer than those that express such a contrast through other means. The Chinese participants were speakers of Qing Tian Hua which, as any other Chinese language, has a very poor morphology-almost every word consists of a single morpheme. Number distinctions are expressed through different particles-such as cardinals, quantifiers, and a group of classifiers-while definiteness is mainly discursively established.
