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Assessing the effect of lexical aspect and grounding on the acquisition of L2 Spanish past tense morphology among L1 English speakers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

MAXIMO RAFAEL SALABERRY
MAXIMO RAFAEL SALABERRY*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 1 University Station B3700, Austin, TX 78712-1155, USAsalaberry@mail.utexas.edu
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Abstract

The present study compares the relative effect of inherent lexical aspect and discursive grounding on the use of L2 Spanish Preterit and Imperfect. The study is based on the analysis of responses to a written 40-item discourse-based forced-choice task among 286 English-speaking learners of Spanish. The analysis of data (repeated measures ANOVA) reveals that as learners gain more experience with the target language, the effect of both lexical aspect and grounding on past tense marking increases. That is, contrary to previous predictions, learners constantly move towards prototypical associations of lexical-narrative factors with morphological markers as knowledge of the second language increases. Second, grounding is the construct that most clearly distinguishes learners from native speakers.

Keywords

aspectlexical aspectdiscourseL2 acquisition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 184 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Marianne Akerberg and Beatriz Granda (from Universidad Nacional de México), and Virginia Bertolotti (from Universidad de la República-Uruguay) for their help with the collection of data from Spanish native speakers in Mexico and Uruguay. I would also like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve the final manuscript.

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