Acquisition of English Tense-Aspect Morphology by Advanced French Instructed Learners  

Oleh:

Ayoun, Dalila ; Salaberry, M. Rafael

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Learning Journal vol. 58 no. 3 (Sep. 2008), page 555–595.
Topik: tense and aspect; past tense morphology; aspect hypothesis; discourse hypothesis; English as a foreign language; French instructed learners; second/foreign language learning
Fulltext: Acquisition of English Tense-Aspect Morphology by Advanced French Instructed Learners.pdf (581.48KB)

Isi artikel

The acquisition of English verbal morphology has been mostly tested as a second language (L2) in English-speaking settings (Bardovi-Harlig, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1998; Bardovi-Harlig & Bergstr¨om, 1996; Bayley, 1991, 1994), more rarely as a foreign language (e.g., Robison, 1990, 1995), in only one cross-sectional study with native speakers of French in a foreign/L2 setting in Quebec (Collins, 2002), and never with French speakers living in France, who have much less exposure to English than their Francophone counterparts living in Quebec. The present cross-sectional study analyzes data from a group of 21 high school French speakers learning English in France to address two main research questions: (a) Do our learners exhibit nativelike performance in their use of the various past morphological forms across the lexical aspectual classes (e.g., Vendler, 1957/1967)? (b) Does their first language lead French speakers to overuse the English present perfect due to its morphological similarity with the pass´e compos´e? Our findings underscore the effect of lexical aspect on the use of past tense markers while highlighting a significant departure from the predicted developmental path of past tense marking: States are marked more consistently than telic events in the narrative task. Possible theoretical and methodological factors that might account for the present findings are discussed.

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