Poverty-of-the-Stimulus and SLA Epistemology: Considering L2 Knowledge of Aspectual Phrasal Semantics

Gradient competence at the Syntax-Discourse Interface

“…The learners' names were not known to the investigators, to protect their identity. The test materials included a proficiency test based on the DELE (official exam of proficiency administered by the Spanish Ministry of Education) that is standardly used by generative L2 Spanish research (e.g., White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska-MacGregor & Leung, 2004;Montrul, 2004;Rothman & Iverson, 2008). The test contains 50 items (distributed between a close test format and multiple choice).…”

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

“…Of course, we believe that the semantic nuances at play here are indeed generalizable, albeit extremely subtle. As it relates to the methodology in and Rothman and Iverson (2008), there perhaps is a confound based on the people who were tested in that both groups represent highly educated speakers and it might be that they are able to get at these interpretations more easily given the inherent complexity of the tasks themselves.…”

“…The first studies focused on the acquisition of L2 English by Bulgarian native speakers (Slabakova 2000(Slabakova , 2003, or both Bulgarian and Spanish native speakers (Slabakova 2001) to test the semantic-morphology interface, the acquisition of L2 Spanish by native speakers of English (Montrul 2002;Slabakova 2002, 2003;Slabakova and Montrul 2000, as well as the di¤erences between Standard Russian and American Russian in Russian-English bilingual speakers (Pereltsvaig 2002). Then, a variety of studies started to target other L2 languages, such as French (Leung 2002;Ayoun 2005a,b), Spanish (Schell 2000) and Portuguese (Goodin-Mayeda and Rothman 2007;Rothman and Iverson 2008). Covering a wide range of L1 backgrounds, these studies investigate the L2 (or L3) acquisition of lexical aspect (telicity), grammatical or viewpoint aspect (perfectiveness and iterativity), and mood/modality (the indicative and subjunctive).…”

“…The second goal is to elucidate the course of linguistic development, isolat and 1. See a special issue of the journal The Linguistic Review (2002, volumes 1 and 2) entitled A review of the poverty of the stimulus argument for a collection of recent articles that address the debate inherent to this topic, as well as Rothman and Iverson (2008), who use the criteria set forth in Pullman and Scholz (2002) to demonstrate that poverty of the stimulus, at least for complex semantic entailments derived via the acquisition of syntactic derivation, robustly exists. then explaining the steps through which individuals proceed from an initial state of underspecified structures through a series of consecutive states of more detailed specification.…”

“…related study, Rothman and Iverson (2008) tested 31 learners of L2 Portuguese focusing on other semantic entailments related to the aspectual distinction of adverbial quantification whereby only such perfective sentences lose the otherwise available kind-denoting reading of the subject DP, retaining only the group-denoting reading (e.g., Menéndez-Benito 2002). Rothman and Iverson (2008) showed that the same learners from , who demonstrated the target [eaccidental] interpretative nuances, were also successful in interpreting restrictions on DP interpretations, related to the same aspectual distinction (but see Chapter 6).…”