The perfective past tense in Greek as a second language

Abstract

This study reports results from four experiments investigating the perfective past tense of Greek in adult second language (L2) learners. The data come from L2 learners of Greek with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency and different native language (L1) backgrounds, and L1 speakers of Greek. All participants were tested in both oral and written elicited production and acceptability judgment tasks on both existing and novel verb stimuli. The results showed that the L2 learners did not achieve native-like performance on the perfective past tense in Greek, even at an advanced level of proficiency. The L2 learners often chose verb forms that did not encode the perfective past tense. Differences to native speakers were found particularly for non-sigmatic verb forms, which contain morphological irregularities in the target language. The results of the four experiments will be discussed in the light of previous findings and accounts of inflectional morphology in adult L2 learners. Taken together, the results suggest that L2 learners rely more on stored inflected word forms and on associative generalizations than native speakers.

Education and Input as Predictors of Second Language Attainment in Naturalistic Contexts

“…It is striking that even the youngest L1 learners tested by Stavrakaki and Clahsen (2009), who were aged between 3 and 4, performed better than our participants: the scores in this age group were 70%, 36% and 39% respectively in these three tasks. Clahsen et al (2010) used the same test with highly educated instructed learners with a much shorter length of residence (from 2.3 to 6.8 years), and this group did much better than our participants, achieving scores of 90% on existing sigmatic verbs, 66% on existing nonsigmatic verbs, and 76% on non-rhyming nonce verbs. These results suggest that for complex inflectional systems such as the Greek past tense, explicit instruction appears to be necessary for adult learners to acquire the system.…”

“…Furthermore, more than a third of our participants, and almost two-thirds of those with no more than eight years of schooling, failed to produce a single target form on the nonce verb inflection task. Since we used the same test as Stavrakaki and Clahsen (2009) and Clahsen et al (2010), we can directly compare our results with theirs. It is striking that even the youngest L1 learners tested by Stavrakaki and Clahsen (2009), who were aged between 3 and 4, performed better than our participants: the scores in this age group were 70%, 36% and 39% respectively in these three tasks.…”

“…The past tense production task was based on Clahsen et al (2010). In this task, participants were presented with pairs of pictures depicting an ongoing ( Figure 3) and a completed action (Figure 4).…”

Judgment and Interpretation Tasks in Second Language Research

“…If the linguistic phenomenon of interest is dependent on context or includes novel forms (cf. Clahsen et al, 2010; Year & Gordon, 2009), then a context-based AJT or interpretation task should be considered. Semantic and pragmatic phenomena require context: The same grammatical sentence may be appropriate and felicitous in one context, but inappropriate or infelicitous in another.…”

“…However, preference tasks can also be paired with pictures to provide a context for interpretation. One recent example of this methodology is a study by Clahsen, Martzoukou, and Stavrakaki (2010), which investigated the acquisition of the perfective past tense in Greek. The materials for their preference task included sets of pictures; the first picture in each set depicted an ongoing activity (e.g., a child eating a cake) and the second picture showed the completed activity (e.g., an empty plate).…”