Volume 51, Issue 3

There are numerous studies that analyze the second language (L2) acquisition of aspect (e.g., see overviews and summaries in Ayoun and Salaberry 2005; Bardovi-Harlig 2000; Labeau 2005; Salaberry, 2008; Salaberry and Shirai 2002). The present study focuses on a specific component of tense-aspect: the iteration of eventualities (iterativity and habituality) conveyed with the use of Spanish Preterite and Imperfect respectively. The analysis is based on data from monolingual Spanish speakers and L1 English speakers with near-native competence in the L2 with the use of contextualized grammaticality judgments. The findings of the study show that near-native speakers of L2 Spanish do not distinguish fine-grained representations of aspectual knowledge (iterativity versus habituality), even though they demonstrate native-like judgments with more prototypical uses of aspect. The discussion of the findings points to possible effects of mapping of meaning and form in the L2, as well as possible instructional effects paired with frequency effects prompted by classroom environments.

There have been several calls to adopt more implicit techniques for investigating how input is processed by second language (L2) learners. This study tested for aural repetition priming using a lexical decision test to establish whether a French verb inflection ( -ons ) can be primed amongst beginner classroom learners of L2 French during activities that broadly reflected two types of aural instructional activities. Fifty one school learners of French were randomly assigned either to an exposure activity which directed their attention to the target inflection or to an activity in which they were asked to try to understand sentences which contained the target inflection. The input was designed to simulate learning situations in which learners find aural comprehension effortful. All participants then did a lexical decision test, to measure the activation of representations of the French verb inflection during the exposure conditions. The results from this preliminary study indicated that greater priming effects followed the instructional activity that focused attention on the inflection than the activity that focused attention on sentence meaning. This is compatible with acoustic word priming research that suggests an orientation to meaning inhibits priming for some learners, and also with pedagogical research that suggests that focusing learners' attention to some features of the input is helpful. Our findings in the aural domain seem to run counter to recent research suggesting that regardless of the orientation of attention during training, orthographic representations of suffixes can be primed during visual word recognition. Future applications of this technique for investigating the allocation of attention in L2 input processing are discussed.

This paper presents empirical evidence on the development of aspect by English- and German-speaking university learners of French L2 collected from a spoken narrative task and a sentence interpretation task. Contrary to the Aspect Hypothesis's predictions, this study's results suggest that increased use of prototypical pairings goes in hand with increased L2 proficiency. Following a small but growing number of studies, this study questions the route of L2 development proposed by the Aspect Hypothesis.