Interpreting tense in a second language

Gabriele, Alison; Maekawa, Junko

doi:10.1075/eurosla.8.07gab

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The L1 Japanese and L1 Korean learners performed well as expected. Gabriele and Maekawa's (2008) findings provide evidence against Hawkins and Liszka's (2003) proposal of a permanent syntactic deficit in the L2 when a feature such as [epast] is not instantiated in the L1.…”

Section: Tense and Aspect In L2 Englishcontrasting

confidence: 47%

“…They allowed a perfective reading for the English past progressive even when the L1 Japanese interpretation is progressive, leading Gabriele, Martohardjono, and McClure (2005) to suggest that the perfective is a default interpretation in the mental representation of te-iru. Gabriele and Maekawa (2008) compared three groups of L2 English learners -native speakers of Chinese (n ¼ 32), Korean (n ¼ 18), and Japanese (n ¼ 55) -at di¤erent levels of proficiency. Contrary to Japanese and Korean, Chinese does not encode tense morpho-syntactically and presumably does not have a Tense projection (Lin 2005).…”

Section: Tense and Aspect In L2 Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Chapter 4. Generative approaches to the L2 acquisition of temporal-aspectual-mood systems

Ayoun¹,

Rothman²

2013

Research Design and Methodology in Studies on L2 Tense and Aspect

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Section: Tense and Aspect In L2 Englishcontrasting

confidence: 47%

Section: Tense and Aspect In L2 Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chapter 4. Generative approaches to the L2 acquisition of temporal-aspectual-mood systems

Ayoun¹,

Rothman²

2013

Research Design and Methodology in Studies on L2 Tense and Aspect

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“…12. Results of the English NSs as well as the L2 English intermediate-and highprofi ciency learners for the accomplishments in the present progressive and the simple past were also reported in Gabriele and Maekawa ( 2008) .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Transfer and Transition in the Sla of Aspect

Gabriele

2009

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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Previous studies have shown that it is particularly difficult for second language (L2) learners to overcome the effects of transfer when they need to unlearn specific aspects of the native language in the absence of explicit input that indicates which properties of the first language (L1) are ruled out by the L2 grammar (Inagaki, 2001; Westergaard, 2003; White, 1991a, 1991b). The present study focuses on the effects of transfer in the domain of aspectual semantics through an investigation of the interpretation of the present progressive in L2 English and the imperfective marker te-iru in L2 Japanese and examines whether L2 learners can rule out interpretations available in the L1 but not in the L2. Japanese learners of English (n = 101), English native-speaker controls (n = 23), English learners of Japanese (n = 31), and Japanese native-speaker controls (n = 33) completed an interpretation task in English or Japanese. The results show that the L2 Japanese learners were more successful than the L2 English learners in both acquiring the semantics of the imperfective in the L2 and ruling out interpretations available only in the L1. It is proposed that successful unlearning depends on both the grammatical complexity of the semantic target in the L2 and the transparency of the input cues available to the learner.

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“…Previous research on the acquisition of English temporal morphology, and especially the interpretation of findings by Gabriele and Maekawa (), coupled with the processing results of Chan (), suggest that the deictic principle is also in action when Chinese speakers approach English. However, it works against them to some extent.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…For example, Lardière's () fossilized speaker Patty provided the ‐ed marker in around 34% of obligatory contexts, while Yang and Lyster's () instructed learners provided 55–63% past tense marking in oral (pretest) production and 65–73% in written production. Investigating interpretation, Gabriele and Maekawa () offered evidence of successful comprehension of the English temporal contrasts by advanced levels of proficiency. Recently, Chan () showed that in processing English sentences online, advanced learners were not sensitive to omitted past tense morphology (e.g., * Yesterday several large snakes escape‐Ø from their cage at the zoo) but they were sensitive to meaning clashes between adverbial and tense information (e.g., # Tomorrow several large snakes escaped from their cage at the zoo ).…”

Section: Acquisition Of Temporality Markingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring Temporal Meanings Without Tense Morphology: The Case of L2 Mandarin Chinese

Slabakova

2015

The Modern Language Journal

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This article reports on an experimental study addressing the second language acquisition of Mandarin temporality. Mandarin Chinese does not mark past, present, or future with dedicated morphemes; the native English of the learners does. It was hypothesized that, in their comprehension, learners would utilize the deictic pattern of expressing temporality, which postulates that bounded events tend to be interpreted as past and unbounded events as present. Twenty-eight bilingual native speakers, 25 intermediate learners, and 23 advanced learners ofMandarin with English as their native language took three different interpretation tests. Learners' temporal interpretation choices were highly accurate even at intermediate levels of proficiency, suggesting that obeying the deictic pattern in second language comprehension is not hard.Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed. Keywords: Mandarin Chinese; deictic pattern; viewpoint aspect; lexical aspect; temporal interpretation; temporal adverbials Acquiring form-meaning mappings is at the core of second language acquisition (L2A). This is true of lexical items and their meanings (e.g., chair and 'a piece of furniture used for sitting') as well as of functional morphological affixes and the grammatical meanings they capture (e.g., -s and 'plural noun'; -ed and 'past state or event'). While learning lexical items largely depends on the frequency of occurrence of the word (Laufer & Nation, 1995), the acquisition of grammatical form-meaning pairs is affected by many other factors. Understanding these factors and their impact allows us to answer a fundamental research question: Which of the form-meaning mappings of functional morphology are easier to acquire and process than others?1 A broad and common sense understanding of difficulty of acquisition is employed here, assuming that an easy property is one that is acquired successfully at earlier stages of development, as compared to a more difficult property. The practical purpose of identifying easy and hard properties is to aid language teachers: Hard properties should receive more attention and time in a language classroom while easy properties should come for free, as it were (Slabakova, 2008). Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001) propose perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency as factors that are crucial in making a form-meaning mapping difficult. Although all these factors work in concert, what remains unclear is whether one or the other is more important. DeKeyser (2005) puts "transparency of form-meaning relationships" (p. 3) at the heart of linguistic difficulty. In principle, the mapping between functional morphology and grammatical meanings can range over various permutations of one to many, from most to least transparent: one form corresponding to one meaning, one form reflecting multiple meanings, multiple forms reflecting the same meaning, and, finally, a many-to-many relationship. If a universal grammatical me...

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Interpreting tense in a second language

Cited by 6 publications

References 42 publications

Chapter 4. Generative approaches to the L2 acquisition of temporal-aspectual-mood systems

Chapter 4. Generative approaches to the L2 acquisition of temporal-aspectual-mood systems

Transfer and Transition in the Sla of Aspect

Acquiring Temporal Meanings Without Tense Morphology: The Case of L2 Mandarin Chinese

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