The Effect of Lexical Aspect and Discourse Grounding in the Acquisition of Spanish Past Tense Aspect by Mandarin Chinese Speakers: Replicating the Approach Used in Salaberry (2011)

Abstract

In this work, we replicate the approach of Salaberry (2011). Based on an a written 40 item discourse based forced-choice task, we analyze the influence of lexical aspectual class and grounding information in discourse on the use of perfective and imperfective verbal morphology of Spanish by Chinese learners of three levels of proficiency (B1, B2, C1 of the CEFR). Our results show that the preference to use prototypical associations predicted by the LAH and the DH coincide with Salaberry’s (2011) results. However, we found that our L1 Mandarin Chinese learners show a particular developmental pattern compared with the L1 English learners in Salaberry (2011).