More evidence concerning the Aspect Hypothesis: The acquisition of English progressive aspect by Catalan-Spanish instructed learners

Abstract

A robust finding from studies investigating the Aspect Hypothesis is that learners at the early stages of acquisition show a strong preference for using the progressive aspect as associated with activity verbs. As they advance in their acquisition of the second or foreign language, learners move from this prototypical association to associations traditionally considered to be more peripheral (e.g., -ing with accomplishments or achievements).Within this framework, the goal of this paper is to provide further evidence from groups of learners with different proficiency levels with regard to the acquisition of progressive aspect by tutored learners of English who are bilingual Catalan-Spanish. This is done by eliciting data by means of two different task types and by looking at both tokens and types. Our results are consistent with previous research according to which -ing morphology is closely associated with durative lexical aspect, although not necessarily with activity predicates. The study also shows that the type of task has an influence on the frequency and the distribution of learners' progressive forms.