Tense-aspect processing in second language learners

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-à-vis language- specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial acquisition and subsequent emergence of (perfective) past tense and progressive aspect morphology follow a semantic-driven, universal sequence. The AH appeals to a cognitive-based prototype account (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and has gained ample empirical support from offline data in the past two decades. Mounting evidence of transfer, however, has begun to emerge in recent psycholinguistic research, suggesting that grammatical aspectual categories such as the English progressive have non-trivial influence on principles of information organization in language comprehension among L2 learners and bilingual speakers (Stutterheim & Carroll, 2006). This dissertation undertakes a psycholinguistic investigation of L2 learners’ processing of English past and progressive morphology. Participants included native English speakers as well as English L2 learners from Korean, German, and Mandarin Chinese backgrounds, whose L1s differ systematically with respect to past and progressive morphology. This cross-linguistic design enabled a systematic testing of both the prototype and transfer hypotheses in one single study. Three word-by-word self-paced reading experiments examined L2 learners’ automaticity in morphological processing, the universality of tense-aspect prototypes, and aspectual coercion. Experiment I generated evidence that L2 learners were generally capable of detecting tense- aspect morphosyntactic errors online. Reading time results from Experiment II revealed that L2 learners did not show uniform processing advantages afforded by tense-aspect prototypes. Instead, there exist L1 effects in prototypes, at least from evidence in processing L2 tense-aspect distinctions. Experiment III investigated the processing consequences of aspectual coercion in L2 learners, and results indicated strong L1 influence. The most robust finding across the three experiments is that the L2 learners showed clear L1-based variations in their performance, reflecting a strong tendency for transfer. Notably, these results were obtained after controlling for L2 proficiency and inflected verb form frequencies. A more prominent role of L1 influence is implicated in L2 learners’ representation of tense-aspect prototypes than previously assumed

Real-time processing of event descriptions for partially- and fully-completed events: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

The current study investigated non-culminating accomplishments through an experimental lens. We used a well-established paradigm for studying real-time language processing using eye-tracking, the visual world paradigm. Our study was modeled after Altmann and Kamide’s (2007) investigation of processing of aspectual information contained in a perfect verb form (e.g., has eaten). We compared English-speaking adults’ interpretations of sentences like ‘The girl has eaten a cookie’ and ‘The girl was eating a cookie’ in the context of one of two visual scenes. In the Full Completion condition, the scene depicted two referents that were compatible with the predicate: one was compatible with the expected end state of the event (e.g., an empty plate), the other with an unrealized version of the event (e.g., an uneaten cookie). In the Partial Completion condition, the scene depicted a referent that was compatible with a partially-completed version of the event (e.g., part of a cookie on a plate) and an unrealized interpretation (e.g., an uneaten cookie). For verb forms in the perfect (e.g., has eaten) but not in the progressive, we found a difference between conditions; listeners preferred to look at the fully-affected referent in the Full Completion condition as compared to the partially-affected referent in the Partial Completion condition. We take the results as suggestive in favor of a pragmatic rather than semantic account of non-culmination interpretations in English

On-line Processing of Aspectual Coercion by Korean Learners of English

Cho, Jeonghwa. 2017. On-line Processing of Aspectual Coercion by Korean Learners of English. It has been argued that the combination of semelfactive verbs and durational modifiers such as in the baby hiccupped for an hour causes an aspectual mismatch and therefore an additional processing time is necessary to reanalyze the event as an iterative one (Brennan & Pylkkänen, 2008; Piñango et al., 1999, 2006; Todorova et al., 2000). This process of reinterpretation is called an aspectual coercion. Experiment 1 attempted to investigate how aspectually coerced sentences are processed in Korean with online and offline measures. Twenty five Korean participants did not show any processing difficulties in the self-paced reading task but gave lower acceptability ratings for the coerced conditions in the acceptability judgment task. Experiment 2 investigated the same structure in English with Korean learners of English and English native speakers. The same trend as in the Korean experiments was observed in both groups. This study proposes that readers do not fully engage in semantic components in online processing of aspectual coercion in both Korean and English

Processing Coercion in a First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals

Recent work in heritage language grammars has shown variability in L1 competence, despite high proficiency in both languages. While sources of variation have been debated, little attention has been given to the role of language dominance. This thesis uses a self-paced listening task to explicitly investigate the roles of language dominance and pragmatic competence in how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese process aspectual coercion in their non-dominant home language, as compared to late bilinguals. Specifically, constructions that vary in acceptability and salience in input between Mandarin and English are tested: Iterative coercion, complement event coercion of entity NPs, and perfective states. Stimuli are presented auditorily and participants are given two comprehension tasks: 1) Temporal interpretation, and 2) Judgment of acceptability. Answers are compared to Mandarin-dominant late bilinguals’ judgments to derive accuracy and probability of accepting ungrammatical forms, while listening time is taken as a proxy for processing cost. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin relies heavily on pragmatic inference while English marks tense and aspect mandatorily. In addition, resolution of aspectual mismatch has been theorized to be a function of pragmatic knowledge, which tends to be weakened in the heritage language. Thus far, no work has explicitly attempted to find psycholinguistic evidence for such claims. Participants are given a pragmatic competence task in Mandarin in order to test for a relationship with accuracy with correct choices on the temporal interpretation task

Bilingualism effects at the syntax-semantic interface: Evidence from the Spanish present tense

The current study examines the acquisition of the semantic values of the Spanish present tense among English-speaking second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers. With a few exceptions (Cuza, 2008, 2010; Klein, 1980; Pérez-Cortés, 2012; Sánchez-Muñoz, 2004), an area of research still underexplored. The predictions for this study is that bilingualism effects will be evidenced in lower patterns of use, acceptance and preference of the simple present with an ongoing meaning in bilingual speakers, as well as preference for the progressive in ongoing contexts, as this is the pattern available in English. In addition, it is predicted that the heritage speakers will outperform the L2 learners by showing more native-like patterns, confirming previous research (Cuza & Frank, 2015; Montrul, Foote & Perpiñan, 2008). In contrast to what was predicted, the two experimental groups, crucially the group of second language learners, overextended the simple present to all ongoing situations and contexts, where the present progressive is sometimes preferred. On the other hand, the heritage speakers shower a more native-like pattern, which suggests age-related effects in their language development. I argue for morphosemantic convergence toward a less marked and less aspectually restrictive form, which is the Spanish simple present

Temporal prepositions and intervals in Spanish : variation in the grammar of "hasta" and "desde"

In many varieties of American Spanish, the temporal preposition hasta 'until' is able to modify telic predicates in the absence of negation. Previous analyses argue for either a hidden negation or a special punctual reading of this preposition. We show that these analyses make a number of wrong predictions, and should be abandoned. Our account hinges on the idea that hasta licenses a temporal phase previous to the telic predicate, somehow similar to the one that in PP complements (in one hour) create in English and many other languages in similar structures. We also show that desde ('since') is able to behave in a parallel way in some varieties of American Spanish, thus licensing intervals subsequent to temporal points. Several arguments are presented favoring compositional analyses of these (and some other) temporal prepositions subject to Aktionsart restrictions, as opposed to approaches which introduce multiplication of senses

Exploring syntactic and semantic acceptability: A case study on semantic restriction violations and aspectual mismatches

The present study investigates the interaction between syntax and semantics, and its effects on acceptability. The study compares ratings from two experiments – a syntactic rating task and a semantic one – the latter asking for meaningfulness/plausibility. The focus is on two phenomena: semantic restriction violations and aspectual mismatches with for-PPs. For comparison, the experiments also include two reference phenomena: resumptive pronouns, which are ungrammatical but in principle meaningful/plausible, and semantic contradictions, which are not meaningful/plausible but grammatical. Further, we include anchor items of various degrees of grammaticality and meaningfulness/plausibility, in order to calibrate the scale and probe the rating space. The results for the resumptive pronouns and the semantic contradictions, as well as the anchor items, indicate that our participants struggled to distinguish between the two tasks to some degree. Semantic deviations seem to drag down syntactic acceptability, and syntactic anomalies drag down perceived meaningfulness/plausibility. Importantly, however, the results remain interpretable. We observe that the impact of semantic anomaly on syntactic acceptability differs across phenomena, as did the impact of syntactic deviations on semantic acceptability. Furthermore, the semantic restriction violations seem to affect semantic acceptability more than syntactic acceptability. By contrast, the for-PPs received reduced ratings in both tasks. Our findings further substantiate the notion that the border between syntax and semantics is not clear-cut and that the interface between the two is complex