The Role of Focused Input on the Acquisition of Tense and *Aspect by L2 Learners of French

Duperron, Lucile

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/86267 Copy

Description

Title

The Role of Focused Input on the Acquisition of Tense and *Aspect by L2 Learners of French

Author(s)

Duperron, Lucile

Issue Date

2003

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

VanPatten, Bill

Department of Study

French

Discipline

French

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

Education, Language and Literature

Language

eng

Abstract

Cloze test results show that the experimental group exhibited a U-shaped behavior in their use of imperfective vs. perfective morphology with achievement verbs after they received the input flood. They selected more often an unbounded interpretation of achievement predicates when the context required a bounded interpretation. In contrast, no statistically significant change of scores was observed on the aspectual judgment test for their evaluation of telics in either the preterite or the imperfect. In other words, L2 representation was not affected. Overall results confirmed the leading role of lexical aspect on intermediate learners' use of tense and aspect. An important implication of this study is that the semantic complexity of the imperfect combined with the inherent semantic value of verbs affected learners' performance. Further testing is needed to investigate the effect of input that provides learners with specific combinations of grammatical and lexical aspect at the various acquisitional stages charted by the Aspect Hypothesis.

Graduation Semester

2003

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/86267

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