Premium
Inherent Aspect and L1 Transfer in the L2 Acquisition of Spanish Grammatical Aspect
Author(s) -
GONZÁLEZ PAZ,
QUINTANA HERNÁNDEZ LUCÍA
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the modern language journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.486
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1540-4781
pISSN - 0026-7902
DOI - 10.1111/modl.12502
Subject(s) - linguistics , imperfect , typology , psychology , grammatical category , task (project management) , past tense , second language acquisition , first language , morpheme , language transfer , transfer of training , computer science , cognitive psychology , verb , history , language education , comprehension approach , noun , philosophy , archaeology , management , economics
The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of Spanish past tenses by L1 Dutch and L1 English learners at first stages of acquisition. Differences in grammatical aspect in both L1 and the second language (L2) predict that learners will have difficulties acquiring grammatical differences such as the contrast between the Preterit and the Imperfect. Recent studies claim that not all learners are biased by the traditional Vendlerian lexical aspect typology (Domínguez et al., 2013; González, 2013), which may mean that refinement of the LAH is necessary. For our study, L1 English and Dutch learners of Spanish performed the same written production task, which involved the retelling of a story after watching a muted video. The results, based on an approximate binomial distribution analysis, show that the use of both the Preterit and the Imperfect by English‐speaking learners is biased by dynamicity contrasts. Furthermore, their overuse of Preterit to complete the written task shows L1 transfer from the English past tense, which can be uttered in perfective and imperfective contexts. On the other hand, the results of L1 Dutch speakers show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by the terminative‐durative classification, and that they prefer the Present Perfect in perfective contexts, also showing L1 transfer.