Assessing the effect of lexical aspect and grounding on the acquisition of L2 Spanish past tense morphology among L1 English speakers

Abstract

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1366728910000052How to cite this article: MAXIMO RAFAEL SALABERRY (2011). Assessing the effect of lexical aspect and grounding on the acquisition of L2 Spanish past tense morphology among L1 English speakers.The present study compares the relative effect of inherent lexical aspect and discursive grounding on the use of L2 Spanish Preterit and Imperfect. The study is based on the analysis of responses to a written 40-item discourse-based forced-choice task among 286 English-speaking learners of Spanish. The analysis of data (repeated measures ANOVA) reveals that as learners gain more experience with the target language, the effect of both lexical aspect and grounding on past tense marking increases. That is, contrary to previous predictions, learners constantly move towards prototypical associations of lexical-narrative factors with morphological markers as knowledge of the second language increases. Second, grounding is the construct that most clearly distinguishes learners from native speakers.

L2 acquisition of Mandarin zai and -le

“…This result supported the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH) (e.g., Salaberry, 2011), which predicts that L2 learners use a default marker of past tense at the beginning stage of acquisition. In this stage, the use of past tense marker among adult learners is independent of the effect of inherent lexical aspectual value of verbal predicates (Salaberry, 1999).…”

“…This goes against the Developmental Prediction of the AH. However, the DPTH has only been tested and verified in beginning level learners of Spanish with L1 English (Salaberry, 1999(Salaberry, , 2003(Salaberry, , 2011. This paper…”

“…The results instead are consistent with the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH). The DPTH has been tested and verified in beginning level learners of Spanish with L1 English (Salaberry, 1999(Salaberry, , 2003(Salaberry, , 2011. It predicts that learners initially use perfective past marking as a default past tense marker.…”

Analysing Interlanguage Stages ALEs Pass through in the Acquisition of the Simple Past Tense

“…Pinker & Prince, 1988) or offering alternatives, either connectionist, such as: MacWhinney & Leinbach, (1991); Plunkett & Juola, (1999); Plunkett & Marchman, (1991, or symbolic, such as Ling & Marinov, (1993). A substantial amount of information has been gathered about the use of past tense verbal morphology in a variety of languages, such as Andersen, 1986, Bardovi-Harlig & Reynolds, (1995 ;Salaberry, (2003), and Salaberry & Shirai, (2002).…”

Enhancing metalinguistic knowledge

“…The main factors contributing to the difficulty of the Preterite/Imperfect are that (a) aspectual contrasts in Spanish are obligatorily marked; that is, when referring to past events, learners must choose between Preterite and Imperfect; (b) to appreciate a speaker's intended meaning, the learner needs to understand that aspectual interpretation is compositional: it depends on the whole verb phrase and other contextual information such as adverbials (Salaberry 2013); related to this, (c) grammatical information (past tense morphology) can override lexical information (the inherent semantic value of verbs); for example, while an event such as dormir (sleep) is atelic, the choice of the Preterite produces a telic interpretation: Juan durmió (pret) en el parque (Juan slept in the park/finished) as opposed to Juan dormía (imp) en el parque (Juan slept in the park/unfinished) (Domínguez et al, 2013;Salaberry 2011); (d) the meanings which can be conveyed by the Preterite/Imperfect are wide-ranging, going beyond (un)boundedness: habituality versus iterativity, genericity versus specificity, irrealis versus actual occurrence (Doiz-Bienzobas 1995). The resultant lack of transparency in form-meaning mappings leads to increased learning difficulty (Author 2009).…”