Article published in:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 33:2 (2020) ► pp. 588–617

A story-writing based study on the acquisition of aspect in Spanish by Mandarin Chinese learners

| Nanjing Normal University
| Universitat Pompeu Fabra
| University of Barcelona
In this paper, we analyze the acquisition of Spanish past tense aspect by Mandarin Chinese learners of Spanish by means of three semi-guided writing tests. Specifically, we analyze the choice of pretérito indefinido and pretérito imperfecto, taking into account lexical aspect, grounding information, and the combination of both as variables. Moreover, we analyze whether transfer from Mandarin Chinese, the students’ first language (L1), occurs in the acquisition process. Our results partly support the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen, 1991; Andersen & Shirai, 1996) and the Discourse Hypothesis (Bardovi-Harlig, 1994). According to these hypotheses, verbal properties and grounding information play a role in the selection of pretérito indefinido or pretérito imperfecto. Finally, our data support the existence of L1 transfer at the semantic level only.
Keywords: L2 acquisition of aspect, lexical aspect, grammatical aspect, grounding information, L1 transfer, Spanish-Chinese learner data
Keywords: adquisición de aspecto en L2, aspecto léxico, aspecto gramatical, información de foco y fondo, transferencia de la L1, datos de aprendices de español-chino mandarín
Published online: 10 February 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.18031.sun
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