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Abstract Based on the Bottleneck Hypothesis (BH) in second language acquisition (SLA) research, this experimental study examined which type(s) of SV-agreement constitute(s) the most challenging bottleneck problem for Chinese EFL learners via an acceptability judgment test and explored the mechanisms that contributed to the problem. 143 students recruited from a middle school, a high school, and a university participated in the experiment. The results showed that long-distance SV-agreement posed persistently more challenge than other SV-agreement types for Chinese EFL learners regardless whether the subject noun phrase was singular or plural. Furthermore, in the long-distance SV-agreement sentences, participants were the least accurate when a plural head noun was followed by a plural local noun. This latter type of SV-agreement presented the greatest and most persistent challenge, therefore constituting a bottleneck problem in Chinese students’ learning of English since their accuracy barely improved with the increase of their English proficiency level, age, or length of English learning. A combination of factors is believed to have resulted in this bottleneck problem, including differences between English and Chinese, low salience of SV-agreement, the allocation of the learners’ attentional resources, and their representation of the number information of the subject noun phrases.
Key words: the bottleneck problem; SV-agreement; foreign language learning; the acceptability judgement test
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