
Testing the aspect first hypothesis: a preliminary investigation into the comprehension of tense in child Greek
Author(s) -
Sophia Delidaki,
Spyridoula Varlokosta
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.29.2003.169
Subject(s) - morpheme , past tense , linguistics , comprehension , present tense , verb , future tense , psychology , morphology (biology) , interpretation (philosophy) , philosophy , genetics , biology
Crosslinguistic research on the production of tense morphology in child language has shown that young children use past or perfective forms mainly with telic predicates and present or imperfective forms mainly with atelic predicates. However, this pattern, which has come to be known as the Aspect First Hypothesis, has been challenged in a number of comprehension studies. These studies suggest that children do not rely on aspectual information for their interpretation of tense morphology. The present paper tests the validity of the Aspect First Hypothesis in child Greek by investigating Greek-speaking children’s early comprehension of present, past and future tense morphology as well as the role that lexical aspect plays in the early use of tense morphology. It is suggested that although Greek-speaking children have not yet fully mapped the tense concepts to the correct tense morphology, tense acquisition does not seem to be significantly affected by the aspectual characteristics (i.e. the telicity) of the verb.