Is there primacy of aspect in child L2 English?

Abstract

accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in child L2 English. The main question addressed is whether early uses of tense-aspect in¯ections can be analyzed as a spell-out of semantic/aspectual features of verbs (such as punctuality, telicity, durativity, etc.). The data are drawn from a detailed longitudinal study of an eight-year-old Russian-speaking child who was acquiring English as L2 in the USA. It is ®rst shown that the emergence of tense-aspect morphology patterns by aspectual verb class. However, contrary to the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis, it is argued that the acquisition patterns cannot be attributed to``defective'' tense, nor do they re¯ect the spell-out of aspectual features. A new approach to the data is developed that proposes underspeci®cation of the syntactic aspectual head in early L2 child grammar. Relevance of child L2 data for the study of tenseaspectMuch recent research has explored ®niteness in early child L2 by focusing on the acquisition of tense and agreement morphology (

More evidence concerning the Aspect Hypothesis: The acquisition of English progressive aspect by Catalan-Spanish instructed learners

“…Therefore, although it may still be claimed that progressive marking is initially associated with durative verbs, the association is stronger with accomplishment verbs than with activity verbs in the earliest stage. This finding appears to contradict the developmental component of the AH confirmed by previous studies (e.g., Rocca 2002;Gavruseva 2002), according to which -ing is associated with activity verbs at early stages and spreads to other nonprototypical verbs at later stages. However, the finding is in line with a number of studies that have shown that the association of activities with the progressive is not necessarily stronger at the lower levels of proficiency (e.g., Robison 1995;Bardovi-Harlig & Bergström 1996;Bardovi-Harlig 1998;Clachar 2004).…”

“…A series of studies have reported similar findings on the acquisition of the English tense and aspect system by children (Rhode 1996;Gavruseva 2002) uninstructed adult learners in an ESL context (Robison 1990;Bardovi-Harlig and Bergström 1996), and instructed EFL and ESL learners (Bardovi-Harlig 1992;Robison 1995;Bardovi-Harlig and Reynolds 1995;Housen 2002;Collins 2002Collins , 2004Ayoun and Salaberry 2008).…”

“…Many of these studies, however, have shown no clear agreement as to which theoretical explanations should be given to the predictable patterns of acquisition of tense and aspect. Hence, reasons such as the distribution of input (Ayoun and Salaberry 2008;Rhode 1996;Robison 1995;Andersen and Shirai 1994) to which learners are exposed, the influence of the teaching environment (Bardovi-Harlig 1992), L1 influence (Collins 2002(Collins , 2004Sugaya and Shirai 2007) or alternative universal mechanisms (Slabakova 1999;Gavruseva 2002;and Haznedar 2007 for a counterargument) among others, have been advanced in order to provide an explanation for certain robust patterns of the acquisition of tense and aspect morphology. Within the framework of the AH, the goal of this paper is to provide further evidence from cross-sectional data with regard to the acquisition of progressive aspect by learners of English who are bilingual Catalan-Spanish, a language constellation that has not previously been studied in this domain.…”

The acquisition of tense in English: Distinguishing child second language from first language and specific language impairment

“…Numerous studies have shown that child English L2 learners also display variable use of tense morphemes in their interlanguage (Dulay & Burt, 1973, 1974Gavruseva, 2002Gavruseva, , 2004Haznedar, 2001;Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997;Ionin & Wexler, 2002;Jia & Fuse, 2007;Lakshmanan, 1994;Paradis, 2005). The more particular question for our purposes is whether they show the (E)OI patterns as described above in their use of optional infinitives.…”

The Aspect Hypothesis, the comparative fallacy and the validity of obligatory context analysis: a reply to Lardiere, 2003

“…Lardiere states in a footnote (p. 136) that ' Robison (1995) is an exception in that he looked at the use of verbal morphology across other temporal contexts (such as present and future) as well', but Bardovi-Harlig's (1999) list of AH studies include many more exceptions: Housen (1993; on Dutch; Robison (1990), Rohde (1996) on English, Shirai and Kurono (1998: Study 1) on Japanese; Andersen (1991) on Spanish. There are more recent studies on English: Bayley, 1999;Lee, 2001;Gavruseva, 2002;Housen, 2002;Rohde, 2002. It is important to point out that only one of these studies (Rohde, 2002) reports an obligatory context analysis, and that it does not restrict the analysis to obligatory contexts (i.e.…”