CReLLU Seminar: Tense-Aspect Agreement Violations in L2 Japanese

1. Past simple: match
   a. Last week, James went swimming every day. Now he’s getting bored of it

   Past simple: mismatch
   b. * Since last week, James went swimming every day. Now he’s getting bored of it

2. Present perfect: match
   a. Since last week, James has gone swimming every day. Now he’s getting bored of it

   Present perfect: mismatch
   b. * Last year, James has gone swimming every day. Now he’s getting bored of it

Our research questions are as follows:

R1. Are Japanese L2 learners able to distinguish between past simple match and mismatch conditions in off-line and on-line tasks?

R2. Are Japanese L2 learners able to distinguish between present perfect match and mismatch conditions in off-line and on-line tasks?

We recruited 16 adult Japanese L2 learners of English and 18 native speakers of English for our study. An untimed acceptability judgment task (AJT) and a self-paced reading experiment were administered to all participants. The self-paced reading task was administered before the AJT in order to avoid priming effects. Five versions of the AJT were created. Each version of the AJT had 24 test items and 26 distractors. The SPR task included four versions. Each version contained 24 test items with comprehension questions and 16 distractors. The findings reveal that L2 learners processed the experimental past simple items similarly between the AJT and in real time. However, for present perfect items, L2 learners could not distinguish between the match and mismatch conditions on the AJT (see Table 1), and there is a processing cost for the present perfect match vs. mismatch conditions. We suggest that the performance differences between the L2 group and native controls can be explained by influences from the learners’ first language (L1) due to differences in L1 and L2 lexical semantics: Japanese L2 learners are not sensitive to present perfect aspect as there is a mismatch between form and meaning in the L1 and L2 (Gabriele, Martohardjono & McClure, 2005), but Japanese L2 learners have underlying linguistic competence of English tense distinctions. Part of the underlying L2 competence of past simple is a result of L1 transfer since Japanese has past tense morphological marker -ta. We assume that the past tense feature present in Japanese is simply mapped onto past tense -ed in L2 English, following a feature reassembly account (Lardiere, 2009, Slabakova, 2008).

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