Acquiring Temporal Meanings Without Tense Morphology: The Case of L2 Mandarin Chinese

This article reports on an experimental study addressing the second language acquisition of Mandarin temporality. Mandarin Chinese does not mark past, present, or future with dedicated morphemes; the native English of the learners does. It was hypothesized that, in their comprehension, learners would utilize the deictic pattern of expressing temporality, which postulates that bounded events tend to be interpreted as past and unbounded events as present. Twenty‐eight bilingual native speakers, 25 intermediate learners, and 23 advanced learners of Mandarin with English as their native language took 3 different interpretation tests. Learners’ temporal interpretation choices were highly accurate even at intermediate levels of proficiency, suggesting that obeying the deictic pattern in second language comprehension is not hard. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.