Although the Aspect Hypothesis has been tested in many European languages, it has not been investigated extensively in Chinese. The present study tested the Aspect Hypothesis in relation to two predictions: the Association Prediction, which predicts that perfective aspect (in Chinese,–le) will be associated with telic verbs and progressive aspect (zai) with activity verbs, and the Developmental Prediction, which predicts that such associations will be stronger at early stages of development. The study employed a controlled experiment, which elicited learners’ judgments on perfective–leand progressivezaiin obligatory, incorrect, and optional contexts. The results show that the Association Prediction is only partially supported and that the Developmental Prediction is not supported, in that higher-level learners associate lexical aspect more strongly with the grammatical aspect marker. The results are more consistent with the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (Salaberry 1999. The development of past tense verbal morphology in classroom L2 Spanish.Applied Linguistics20. 151–178), which we propose to be extended to the Lexical Insensitivity Hypothesis.

This study investigated whether Korean children follow the acquisition pattern predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and the relationship between caretakers’ and children’s speech. Accordingly, we analyzed a Korean corpus (Ryu-Corpus) on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), which comprised longitudinal video-recorded interactions of three Korean children and their caregivers. Results indicate that the children used the past marker -ess principally with telic verbs, consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis. Each child’s usage closely reflects the caretaker’s frequency, yielding a high correlation (τ_b = 0.79). However, the acquisition of the imperfective marker -ko iss did not show a predicted association with activity verbs, contrary to the Aspect Hypothesis. Furthermore, caretakers’ input did not correlate with the children’s utterances of the imperfective marker (τ_b = 0.40). We argue that multiple factors such as input frequency, language-specific organization of aspectual semantics, and individual differences should be considered to explain tense-aspect acquisition.

The current study investigates the roles of lexical aspect and phonological saliency in second language acquisition of English past tense morphology. It also explores whether the effects of these factors are affected by data elicitation tasks and learners’ L2 proficiency. We created a learner corpus consisting of data from oral personal narratives from twenty Arabic EFL learners from two proficiency groups (low vs. intermediate/advanced), which were transcribed in CHAT format, tagged, and included in the TalkBank corpora. We also administered a written cloze task. Despite task variations, we find strong evidence that supported the influence of lexical semantics in Arabic learners’ acquisition of past tense marking, confirming the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis.

Comparing universal against language-specific factors, this chapter examines the roles of lexical aspect, morphological regularity, and transfer in the developmental emergence of past and progressive morphology among four adult learners of English from Italian and Punjabi L1 backgrounds. The learner production data were obtained from the European Science Foundation SLA corpus (Perdue 1993). In contrast to qualitative findings by Klein (1995), quantitative results reveal that lexical aspect correlates with the distribution of tense-aspect morphology, supporting the core predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai 1994) that learners predominantly use past/perfective markers with telic predicates, and progressive morphology with activity verbs. A paucity of production data makes it difficult to pinpoint effects of morphological regularity and transfer.