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

Abstract

A robust finding from studies investigating the Aspect Hypothesis is that learn-

Exploring the upper limits of the Aspect Hypothesis

“…In a very recent study carried out with 147 Catalan-Spanish learners of English as a foreign language (111 secondary school pupils and 36 university students), Muñoz and Gilabert (2011) tested the Aspect Hypothesis by means of an interview and a picture-based narrative. The findings confirmed the prototypical association between the progressive -ing marker and durative atelic predicates only in the interview task, whereas in the narrative data, the progressive was initially associated more often with accomplishment predicates than with activities.…”

“…Two additional factors have been found to interfere with the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis for tutored L2 learners, namely their L1 (Collins 2002(Collins , 2004Housen 2002) and the type of task used to elicit the data (Ayoun & Salaberry 2008;Muñoz & Gilabert 2011). In her double cross-sectional study of French-speaking ESL learners in Québec, Collins (2002) found that the use of the perfect form (similar in form but not in function to the French passé composé) increased with telic predicates as an alternative to the simple past form once the latter was used productively.…”

“…The task effect on the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis was explicitly analysed by Muñoz and Gilabert (2011), but Ayoun and Salaberry (2008) also pointed to the fact that different task types might lead to different outcomes when testing the Aspect Hypothesis. For instance, cloze-type tasks allow for better monitoring of specific language forms, whereas narratives tap more directly into the learners' language competence or procedural knowledge of the L2 (see also Sugaya & Shirai 2007).…”

“…For instance, cloze-type tasks allow for better monitoring of specific language forms, whereas narratives tap more directly into the learners' language competence or procedural knowledge of the L2 (see also Sugaya & Shirai 2007). Muñoz and Gilabert (2011) found a strong task effect in their data in that accomplishment predicates outnumbered all other types of predicates in the narrative task, while activity predicates had the highest frequency in the data elicited by means of a personal interview. Consequently, "[w]hen the research focus is the AH, it is evident that carefully controlled tests that elicit the same amount of verb types and verb tokens may yield clearer results than other kind of tasks in which the researcher cannot control for the verb types that the speakers decide to use nor for their frequency" (2011: 258).…”

“…The inherent semantic properties of predicates have been extensively shown to shape the development of tense-aspect morphology in early interlanguage, triggering a series of distributional patterns which bear a close resemblance to those observed in early L1 (Bronckart & Sinclair 1973 for French L1; Antinucci & Miller 1976 for Italian L1 and English L1;Brown 1973;Bloom, Lifter & Hafitz 1980;Shirai 1991;Shirai & Andersen 1995 for English L1; Robison 1990Robison , 1995aBardovi-Harlig 1992Bardovi-Harlig & Reynolds 1995;Bardovi-Harlig & Bergstörm 1996;Collins 2002;Muñoz & Gilabert 2011 for English L2; Andersen 1986Andersen , 1991 for Spanish L2; Comajoan 2001Comajoan , 2005 for Catalan L2; Shirai 2002 for Japanese L2, among others). More specifically, cross-linguistic evidence indicates that, in early stages of language development, whether L1 or L2, consistent formmeaning correlations are established between tense-aspect inflections and the inherent semantic properties of predicates (i.e.…”