L'aspect lexical et le développement du passé composé et de l'imparfait en français L2 : Une étude quantitative auprès d'apprenants hispanophones

Abstract

Lexical aspect and L1-L2 differences are often associated with the perfective and prototypical preference that characterises the development of the L2 French past tense among Anglophones. This study examined whether learners of French with the imperfective in their L1 would exhibit this developmental L2 past tense preference. The overall and appropriate uses of the French perfective and imperfective of 44 Hispanophones from four L2 tense-aspect proficiency levels were documented through a cloze task with 23 prototypical and 23 non-prototypical contexts. ANOVAs of the 2254 tokens generated by the participants revealed that, at low L2 proficiency levels, the participants overrode the perfective preference. Prototypical marking remained a preference across L2 proficiency levels, however. This finding reveals that lexical aspect constitutes a shared L2 acquisition challenge for the use of temporal morphology in L2 non-prototypical contexts even among learners who override verb semantics in their L1.