No abstract

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. * Last week, James has gone swimming every day) in their on-line comprehension. The L2 learners were equally able to distinguish correctly the past simple from the present perfect as measured by a traditional cloze test production task. They were also both able to assess the mismatch items as less acceptable than the match items in an off-line judgment task. Using a self-paced reading task, we investigated whether they could access this knowledge during real-time processing. Despite performing similarly in the explicit tasks, the two learner groups processed the experimental items differently from each other in real time. On-line, only the French L2 learners were sensitive to the mismatch conditions in both the past simple and the present perfect contexts, whereas the German L2 learners did not show a processing cost at all for either mismatch type. We suggest that the performance differences between the L2 groups can be explained by influences from the learners’ first language (L1): namely, only those whose L1 has grammaticized aspect (French) were sensitive to the tense/aspect violations on-line, and thus could be argued to have implicit knowledge of English tense/aspect distinctions.

This paper investigates the L2 acquisition of the distributional and interpretational properties of the English present simple (e.g., She works at home) and present progressive (e.g., She is working at home). To test whether advanced L2 learners are successful in assigning target-like meanings to these forms, sixteen advanced L1 French-L2 English and thirteen L1 English informants participated in two oral tasks and a written gap-fill task. Results indicate that these L2 speakers use both forms productively, but show optionality in consistently producing the progressive in appropriate environments. The study considers a permanent L2 deficit arising from L1-L2 parametric differences as a potential source of difficulty in acquiring the target-like interpretations associated with the two forms.

This study tests the assumption in much of the literature on the second language acquisition of English tense and aspect morphophonology (e.g. bare verbs, V-ing, V-ed) that once speakers are beyond intermediate levels of proficiency, both distribution and interpretation of these forms are represented in a target-like way in their mental grammars. Three groups of advanced non-native speakers (whose L1s were Chinese, Japanese and the verb-raising languages Arabic, French, German and Spanish) were compared with native speakers on an acceptability judgement task requiring informants to judge the appropriateness of sentences involving different verb forms to contexts which privileged specific interpretations. The results suggest an effect of the persistent influence of parametric differences between languages such that where parametrised grammatical properties are not activated in the L1, they are not available for the construction of representations in the L2.

Explaining the persistent optional use of overt forms of certain grammatical properties in adult second language acquisition (SLA) raises the question of whether or not such difficulties are directly attributable to first language (L1) influence. Using Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theoretic framework (1986/95), this paper considers how a grammatical deficit could contribute to non-native-like pragmatic processing at the level of explicature formation=recovery, on the assumption that the decoding of grammatical knowledge at logical form initiates the pragmatic development required for explicature formation. The study focuses on the contrast between the English present perfect (e.g., I have danced/sung) and the semantically close present (e.g., I dance/sing) and preterit (e.g., I danced/sang). Results from comparative data of second language (L2) English speakers from three typologically different language backgrounds (German, Japanese and Chinese) are used to explain how the L1 might influence the L2 acquisition of the present perfect and to assess pragmatic differences post-logical-form, resulting from such an influence.