Although SLA research has extensively investigated the role of lexical aspect in L2 acquisition of tense-aspect
marking, the role of L1 is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates the effect of cross-linguistic variation in lexical
aspect and explores how the learning of lexical aspect interacts with the acquisition of aspectual morphology, using oral
picture-description and written judgment tasks. 391 learners of Japanese (L1 English, Chinese, and Korean) participated in the
study. The results show that L2 learners have problems in rejecting incorrect L2 aspectual structures (but not in accepting
correct ones) when such structures involve L1–L2 discrepancy in lexical aspect. The results also confirmed a strong L1 effect at
the level of surface inflected verbal form, showing significantly higher accuracy for items for which direct translation yields
correct meaning than those that do not. It is argued that L1 transfer may be playing an important role in the L2 acquisition of
aspect in that both positive and negative transfer collectively determine the order of acquisition predicted by the Aspect
Hypothesis.
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