Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology in English by Native Speakers of Costa Rican Spanish: The Case of Simple Present and Present Progressive

Abstract

This study investigated whether native speakers of Costa Rican Spanish are capable of acquiring a series of typical and atypical meanings associated with the English Simple Present and Present Progressive. Given the similarities between these languages, this study also explored the role of the L1 in the acquisition properties that are similar in the L2. Two tasks were implemented in order to explore this issue. A Grammaticality Judgment Task tested learners' and natives' acceptability of English sentences with simple present and progressive morphology presented in isolation while an Interpretation Task tested acceptability of the same types of sentences but in the presence of a context provided by a preceding story. The stimuli designed for these tasks were organized in three experiments. The first experiment looked at activities like Marcela writes/is writing poetry. The second experiment tested acquisition of activities with a habitual meaning as in Ana writes/is writing poetry now. The third experiment tested futurates like Carmen returns/is returning to Spain next week. The results suggest that the L1 does not seem to play an important role in the acquisition of the L2 tense-aspect morphology. However, contextual information and the presence of adverbs proved to be a key element in access to the correct interpretation of less typical meanings associated with simple present and the progressive.