University of Oregon
May 31, 3:00-4:30, 145 Straub
(Why) is the Imperfective difficult to acquire?
Insights from comprehension of Russian aspectual information by English native speakers.
A review of recent studies of acquisition of Russian Verbal Aspect, reveals that comprehension of the morphological Imperfective seems particularly problematic for monolingual children (Kazanina & Philips
2007), adult heritage speakers (Polinsky 2008, Laleko 2010), and second/foreign language (L2) acquirers
(Slabakova 2005, Nossalik 2009).
I argue that the source of difficulty for L2 learners can be attributed to a combination of complex morphology and semantics of the Russian imperfective, transfer from English, and processing limitations.
In this talk I discuss results of two comprehension experiments manipulating three types of morphological imperfectives:(1) primary imperfective activities; (2) secondary imperfective accomplishments; and (3) secondary imperfective achievements.
The off-line semantic entailments (SE) task elicited the most salient interpretations of sentences in which verbal morphology was the only source of aspectual information. In order to find the most logical interpretation of the sentence, the participants needed to retrieve all of its possible interpretations, even those potentially imposed by discourse. In contrast, the on-line stop-making-sense (SMS) task tested the learners’ sensitivity to mismatches between a disambiguating adverbial and the predicate.
The moving window paradigm with no backtracking created a high processing load; however, sentenceinitial adverbials provided contextual information and the simplified the semantic decision. The overall results suggest that the imperfective is acquirable; however, without contextual clues, the morphosemantic complexity of the imperfective hinders L2 learners’ interpretations. In contrast, the regular mechanism of marking secondary imperfectives facilitates their on-line processing when the context is available.
I address these results in light of several hypotheses of L2 acquisition, e.g. the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis
(Salaberry 1999), Interpretability Hypothesis (Hawkins and Hatouri 2007), and Shallow Processing
Hypothesis (Clahsen and Felser 2006) and the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008). This presentation is partially based on my talk at the Second Language Research Forum 2012. I will conclude with an overview of work in progress that continues to pursue the same research question, but now with an added focus on language production.