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Tense and Aspect in Second Language Acquisition and Learner Corpus Research
Edited by Robert Fuchs and Valentin Werner
[Benjamins Current Topics 108] 2020
► pp. 111–134

Arabic learners’ acquisition of English past tense morphology

Lexical aspect and phonological saliency

| The University of Melbourne
| Case Western Reserve University
The current study investigates the roles of lexical aspect and phonological saliency in second language acquisition of English past tense morphology. It also explores whether the effects of these factors are affected by data elicitation tasks and learners’ L2 proficiency. We created a learner corpus consisting of data from oral personal narratives from twenty Arabic EFL learners from two proficiency groups (low vs. intermediate/advanced), which were transcribed in CHAT format, tagged, and included in the TalkBank corpora. We also administered a written cloze task. Despite task variations, we find strong evidence that supported the influence of lexical semantics in Arabic learners’ acquisition of past tense marking, confirming the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis.
Keywords: Aspect Hypothesis, Phonological Saliency Hypothesis, task variation, L2 proficiency, EFL
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1Grammatical and lexical aspect
    • 2.2The Aspect Hypothesis
    • 2.3The Phonological Saliency Hypothesis
    • 2.4Lexical aspect and phonological salience: Independence or interaction?
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Learner sample
    • 4.2Elicitation tasks
    • 4.3Data analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The AH: Personal narrative and cloze tasks
    • 5.2The Phonological Saliency Hypothesis: Personal narrative and cloze tasks
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.108.ijlcr.17006.zha
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