The Aspect Hypothesis and the Acquisition of L2 Past Morphology in the Last 20 years

Bardovi‐Harlig, Kathleen; Comajoan-Colomé, Llorenç

doi:10.1017/s0272263120000194

Cited by 50 publications

(39 citation statements)

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“…(3) Functional theories of SLA emphasize the interplay of form and meaning in acquisition. One much-researched example for morphology is the Aspect Hypothesis (AH) ( Andersen and Shirai, 1996 ; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000 ; for a state-of-the-scholarship review of the last 20 years of research, see Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé, 2020 ). The AH builds on three main constructs: tense, grammatical aspect, and lexical aspect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Namely, verbal morphology will be attracted to and will occur with predicates with similar semantics. Perfective past will occur with telic predicates (i.e., those with inherent endpoints), imperfective will occur with unbounded predicates, and progressive will occur with ongoing activities” ( Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé, 2020 , p. 3). Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé conclude from their review of perhaps thirty different studies that the AH accurately predicts the adult L2 acquisition of past morphology in a number of languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Guo

Ellis

2021

Front. Psychol.

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A large body of psycholinguistic research demonstrates that both language processing and language acquisition are sensitive to the distributions of linguistic constructions in usage. Here we investigate how statistical distributions at different linguistic levels – morphological and lexical (Experiments 1 and 2), and phrasal (Experiment 2) – contribute to the ease with which morphosyntax is processed and produced by second language learners. We analyze Chinese ESL learners’ knowledge of four English inflectional morphemes: -ed, -ing, and third-person -s on verbs, and plural -s on nouns. In Elicited Imitation Tasks, participants listened to length- and difficulty-matched sentences each containing one target morpheme and typed the whole sentence as accurately as they could after a short delay. Experiment 1 investigated lexical and morphemic levels, testing the hypotheses that a morpheme is expected to be more easily processed when it is (1) highly available (i.e., occurring in frequent word-forms), and (2) highly reliable (i.e., occurring in lemma words that are consistently conjugated in the form containing this morpheme). Thirty sentences were made for each morpheme, divided into three Availability-Reliability Distribution (ARD) groups on the basis of corpus analysis in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008-): 10 target words high in availability, 10 high in reliability, and 10 low in both reliability and availability. Responses were scored on whether the target morpheme was accurately reproduced given the provision of the correct lemma. A generalized linear mixed-effects logit model (GLMM) revealed fixed effects of morpheme type, availability, and reliability on the accuracy of morpheme provision. There were no effects of lemma frequency. Experiment 2 successfully replicated these results and extended the investigation to explore phrasal formulaicity by manipulating the frequency of the four-word strings in which the morpheme was embedded. GLMMs replicated the effects of word-form availability and reliability and additionally revealed independent phrase-superiority effects where morphemes were better reproduced in contexts of higher string-frequency. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that morpheme acquisition reflects the distributional properties of learners’ experience and the mappings therein between lexis, morphology, phraseology, and semantics. These conclusions support an emergentist view of the statistical symbolic learning of morphology where language acquisition involves the satisfaction of competing constraints across multiple grain-sizes of units.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Guo

Ellis

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…In the studies of L2 acquisition of tense-aspect morphology, the prototypical associations, such as achievement verbs, with past tense and activity verbs with the progressive aspect, have been observed and summarized in the Aspect Hypothesis ( Shirai, 1991 ; Andersen and Shirai, 1994 ; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000 ; Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé, 2020 ). It has been suggested that this is because of the compatibility of the semantic representation of lexical and grammatical aspect.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical and Grammatical Aspect in On-line Processing of English Past Tense and Progressive Aspect by Mandarin Speakers

2021

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Previous studies have shown that the grammatical aspect of verb predicates has an effect on tense-aspect sentence processing. However, it remains unclear as to whether the interaction of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect can influence the form-meaning association in the second language (L2) tense-aspect sentence processing, especially for the learners whose native language is grammatically marked differently from their L2. This study conducts a psycholinguistic investigation to highlight how the prototypical and non-prototypical associations predicted in the Aspect Hypothesis and L2 proficiency level influence the processing of English past tense and progressive morphology by Mandarin Chinese learners at two proficiency levels and native English speakers. The results show that the prototypical associations of English tense-aspect categories predicted in the Aspect Hypothesis, such as achievement verbs with past tense and activity verbs with the progressive aspect, can engender shorter reading time than non-prototypical associations for both native speakers and second language learners. There is no significant difference between native speakers and Chinese learners of English in their processing of prototypical items, while significant differences exist in the processing of non-prototypical items. The L2 proficiency level does not have an effect on the processing of prototypes but on the processing of non-prototypes in the L2 tense-aspect marking. This study extends previous research, showing the interaction effect of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in the form-meaning association in L2 tense-aspect sentence processing.

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“…A combination of the L1 factor and the role of inherent aspect has recently been studied by González and Quintana Hernández (2018). To read more about these studies, we refer to González (2019), who shows a current overview of these studies, and Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé (2020), who present a state-of the-scholarship review of the last 20 years of research, in which the most tested hypotheses in L2 temporality research are addressed. Alarcón (2011, p. 332) states that "L2 learners are able to fully develop an implicit grammar of the target language, particularly of L2 grammatical features that are absent in their L1".…”

Section: Tense Aspect and Modality (Tam) In Second Language Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Target Variation as a Contributing Factor in TAML2 Production

González¹,

Kleinherenbrink²

2021

Círc. lingüíst. apl. comun.

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This study aims to clarify whether variation in the target language can influence its acquisition. More specifically, this study describes the acquisition of Spanish as a second language (L2) by examining the learning process based on (a) the first language (L1) of the learner and (b) which Spanish dialect is being learnt (the target). The phenomenon under scrutiny is the use of past tenses in the L2, as it has been proven to adequately measure the competence of the learner. Data from two L2 at-home-classroom student groups in the Netherlands, divided by either a European or Latin American oriented study program, has been collected. The task that they have made is a written narrative that elicits past verb forms in hodiernal and prehodiernal contexts. Our data shows a clear distinction in the preference of the past tense forms that each of the groups has, that can only be explained by looking at the Spanish variety which both program offers

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The Aspect Hypothesis and the Acquisition of L2 Past Morphology in the Last 20 years

Cited by 50 publications

References 102 publications

Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

Lexical and Grammatical Aspect in On-line Processing of English Past Tense and Progressive Aspect by Mandarin Speakers

Target Variation as a Contributing Factor in TAML2 Production

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