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SUMMARY:The L1 influences the L2 processing and acquisition of tense/aspec
 t - Professor Leah Roberts (University of York)
DTSTART:20150212T160000Z
DTEND:20150212T173000Z
UID:TALK58014@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Theodora Alexopoulou
DESCRIPTION:Acquiring the means to express temporal distinctions is a core
  task for all second language (L2) learners\, but it has been found to be 
 notoriously difficult. This is no doubt because languages vary considerabl
 y in how tense/aspect is expressed structurally and functionally\, with so
 me mandatorily marking the finite verb for the categories of tense\, aspec
 t\, or both\, via inflectional morphology (pull-ed\, was pull-ing)\; while
  others lacking grammatical categories for tense/aspect altogether. A larg
 e body of L2 research shows that learners initially rely on lexical means 
 like temporal adverbs and have persistent difficulties with inflectional m
 orphology\, that might only be overcome at highly advanced stages (Bardovi
 -Harlig\, 2000\, Liszka\, 2009). Many of these research findings are based
  on elicited production and judgement task data and thus can be argued to 
 pertain to L2 learners’ explicit or metalinguistic knowledge of tense/as
 pect. In contrast\, we know very little about whether L2 learners can deve
 lop implicit knowledge of tense/aspect distinctions that can be applied au
 tomatically in real-time comprehension\, or whether this is dependent on t
 he properties of the first language and/or level of L2 proficiency. In my 
 talk\, I will present the results from a set of experiments (self-paced re
 ading/eye-tracking) in which I examined the the real-time processing of En
 glish past simple\, past progressive and present perfect constructions\, i
 n an attempt to tap into advanced L2 learners’ implicit knowledge of Eng
 lish tense/aspect distinctions. I focused on French\, Greek and German lea
 rners and argue that the performance differences between the L2 groups can
  be explained by influences from the learners’ L1. That is\, only those 
 learners in whose L1s aspect is grammaticised\, demonstrated implicit know
 ledge as they were sensitive to English tense/aspect distinctions during r
 eal-time sentence processing. This was the case even though encoded aspect
 ual features in French and Greek differ from those in English.
LOCATION:GR06/07\, English Faculty Building\, 9 West Road\, Sidgwick Site
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