Use Of Past Tense Research Articles

English Past Tense Use in Bilingual Children With Language Impairment

Grammatical measures that distinguish language differences from language disorders in bilingual children are scarce. This study examined English past tense morphology in sequential bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children, age 7;0-9;0 (years;months). Twelve bilingual children with language impairment (LI) or history of LI and 15 typically developing (TD) bilingual children participated. Thirty-six instances of the past tense including regular, irregular, and novel verbs were examined using an elicited production task. By examining English past tense morphology in sequential bilinguals, we uncovered similarities and differences in the error patterns of TD children and children with LI. The groups differed in the overall accuracy of past tense use according to verb type, as well as the characteristic error patterns. Children with LI performed lower than their TD peers on all verb categories, with an interaction between verb type and group. TD children were better at producing regular verbs and exhibited more productive errors (e.g., overregularization). Conversely, children with LI performed relatively better on irregular verbs and poorest on novel verbs, and they exhibited more nonproductive errors (e.g., bare stem verbs). The results have important clinical implications for the assessment of morphological productivity in Spanish-speaking children who are learning English sequentially.

"Irreproachable Women and Patient Workers": The Memoirs of Victorian Leading Ladies

When Victoria ascended throne, respectable society anathematized those men, women, and children for whom theater was both a workplace and a way of life.1 The middle classes viewed stage, in critic Mary Jean Corbett's words, as the last refuge of disgraced younger son or 'fallen woman/ a sort of domestic foreign legion (118). Actress, manager, and memoirist Marie Bancroft (1839-1921) acknowledges that acting was a profession that respectable society preferred keep at a distance. Describing her childhood in a roving theatrical family, she writes in 1888, to be an actor meant exile from home, family, friends, and general respectability (2). A woman who went on stage was still further ostracized by polite society; she was regarded as fallen or soon be fallen. Bancroft's use of past tense implies that she would like her readers view themselves as having shed anti-theatrical prejudice of past, although her memoir, like that of other leading ladies, is an attempt establish her claim approbation in mind of respectable society. In her study of Victorian and Edwardian autobiographies, Corbett argues persuasively that Bancroft, together with actresses Fanny Kemble and Madge Kendal, do not challenge middleclass ideal of womanhood, but seek perform it, onstage and off (107). I contend that Victorian actresses portray themselves as ordinary, respectable women, but at same time they are also concerned with establishing an image of themselves as skilled professionals who by their own efforts have earned right public acclaim and financial success. In short, these texts aim create an image of a new type of respectable woman, working professional. By 1880s Victorian society was beginning distinguish actress from fallen woman, in part because fictional actresses infiltrated circulating libraries. Novelists created a new, appealing image of actress, usually as an unworldly young woman forced by familial financial disaster support an aged parent or handicapped sibling. After a brief spell on stage, during which she resisted all onslaughts upon her

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

De (on) Verklaarbaarheid Van Fossilisatie

In the literature about fossilization, several definitions have been given and several explanations have been suggested for this phenomenon. I see fossilization as a long-time stagnation in the T2 learning process, leading to errors based on transfer. Fossilization is caused by sociolinguistic, pyscholinguistic and purely linguistic factors. In this paper I concentrate on the acquisition of syntactic structures and on the role of input and instruction in that process. I argue that, although in the acquisition of some syntactic structures, UG plays an important role, this does not account for the whole learning process: learners have not only to reset parameters when acquiring T2 but have to proceduralize knowledge based on the surface structure of sentences. In the case of the use of past tenses in French, many of the Dutch advanced learners of three different levels of proficiency do not acquire native-like intuitions about the use of these tenses, although input as well as instruction are thorough on this point. I suggest that the past tense system is not UG-dependent and that the instruction does not allow proceduralization of the knowledge.

Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach

Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensions of the predicates (durativity and resultativity) in sentences where the verb could take five forms: infinitive, one imperfective past tense (imperfect, 'imparfait'), and three perfective past tenses (perfect 'passé composé', or its 'historic' form 'passé simple', and pluperfect 'plus-que-parfait'). Results show that 10-year-old children have not yet learned the 'adult' functions of verbal forms. The results of these two experiments are discussed in relation to current models of human cognition.

Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach

Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensions of the predicates (durativity and resultativity) in sentences where the verb could take five forms: infinitive, one imperfective past tense (imperfect, 'imparfait'), and three perfective past tenses (perfect 'passé composé', or its 'historic' form 'passé simple', and pluperfect 'plus-que-parfait'). Results show that 10-year-old children have not yet learned the 'adult' functions of verbal forms. The results of these two experiments are discussed in relation to current models of human cognition.

Learner hypothesis and past tense marking in Vietnamese English

ABSTRACT: A number of recent studies on tense in L2 have claimed that the past tense is acquired in developmental stages: verbs, such as ‘build’ and ‘work,’ which are lexico‐aspectually more event‐like (less state‐like) are claimed to be marked for past tense earlier in the developmental process than those, such as ‘be’ and ‘want,’ which are less event‐like (more state‐like). In this paper, I will closely examine seven samples of writing by L1 speakers of Vietnamese to show that grounding, rather than lexical aspect, properly accounts for the selective marking of past tense. I will suggest that the learner‐hypothesis that governs this use of English past tense derives from the transference of a grounding‐marking principle from a tense‐free language, and I will briefly address the pedagogical implications of this finding.

Adding Grammar in a Communicatively Based ESL Program for Children: Theory in Practice

In an effort to improve the quality of young students' second language production, classroom teachers regularly search for more efficient ways to address grammatical form under the time pressures of a content-based school curriculum. If self-correction can be increased through"consciousness raising" (Rutherford & Sharwood Smith, 1985), then learners would seem to benefit from form-focused instruction. For the present study, 11 elementary school students aged 7-14 were pretested and then given daily formal instruction for two weeks in the use of past tense and plural noun forms in an otherwise content-based and communicatively oriented ESL program, after which they were post-tested twice. A significant difference was found between this instructed group and a matched control group receiving no instruction in the successful detection and correction of noun plural forms, but not in a similar test of past tense forms. Furthermore, the instructed group continued to perform well on noun plurals after one month of no focused instruction, suggesting that attention to form had some lasting beneficial effect. Possible reasons for the differential results are discussed.

Reverse‐Order Reports and the Acquisition of Tense: Beyond the Principle of Chronological Order

This article presents the results of a longitudinal study of the expression of temporality in interlanguage that followed 16 adult learners of English as a second language for an average period of 10 months. It focuses on these learners’ presentation of a specific rhetorical device, the reverse‐order report, showing how these learners used tense contrast and time adverbials to produce such reports, and how the emergence of these reports related to more general patterns of tense acquisition. The study indicates that these learners marked reverse‐order reports as deviations from chronological order by their use of tense contrast, time adverbials, and other means, with time adverbials playing a pivotal role. The study also shows that high accuracy of past tense use was a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of reverse‐order reports, and that it was the emergence of these environment for the emergence of the pluperfect (and not vice versa). It further showed that acquisitional prerequisites, and not instruction, played the key role in these acquisitional sequences.

A Japanese child's use of stative and punctual verbs.

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language between the ages of 1;0 and 4;11 in an attempt to find evidence for two of Bickerton's (1981) proposed language acquisition universals, which form part of the language bioprogram hypothesis of language acquisition. As predicted by Bickerton's state-process hypothesis, it was found that all sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Also, with only one exception, all omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of ‘mixed’ verbs, i.e. verbs which behave syntactically as process verbs in Japanese but are nonetheless semantically stative. However, contrasting with Bickerton's hypothesis that children initially use the past tense to mark punctuality, no relationship between past tense use and punctuality was found.

Syntactic findings in developmental verbal apraxia

Spontaneous language samples of eight children diagnosed as presenting developmental verbal apraxia were analyzed in terms of their mean length of utterance, Developmental Sentence Scores, use of 14 grammatical markers, and yes-no and wh-question forms. Although MLUs were greater than the range associated with stage V syntactic development, all children demonstrated difficulties with stage V and beyond grammatical markers and many omitted stage II markers. Developmental Sentence Scores were generally well below chronologic age expectations and revealed notable difficulties with personal pronoun and main verb selection. Omissions or noninversions of auxiliary and/or copulas in yes-no and wh-questions were apparent. Omissions of regular and irregular third-person singular markers, inconsistent use of regular and irregular past tense, and difficulty with question transformations provide evidence that at least some of the errors presented by this group of apraxic children cannot be attributed to motor speech and/or phonologic limitations but rather they evidence concomitant syntactic disorders.

On the Frequency of Use of Tenses in English and German Children's Spontaneous Speech

SZAGUN, GISELA. On the Frequency of Use of Tenses in English and German Children's Spontaneous Speech. CHmLD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 898-901. This cross-cultural study examined the frequency of use of tenses by English and German children between 2-6 and 4-6. Developmental changes in frequency of use of tenses were observed: frequency of use of present tenses decreased significantly with age, at the same rate and level in both languages, and frequency of past and future tenses increased correspondingly, with past tenses increasing more rapidly. Children's frequencies did not correlate with adult frequencies of use of tenses. The children's frequencies of use of present, past, and future tenses were interpreted as indicative of their cognitive organization of temporal experience.

Lietuvių kalbos būtojo kartinio laiko funkciniai atitikmenys anglų kalboje

The paper deals with the referential and subjective functions of Lithuanian būtasis kartinis laikas and its functional equivalents in English. The latter can be chosen from among a number of English tenses: Past Indefinite Tense, Past Continuous Tense, Present Perfect Tense, Present Perfect Continuous Tense, Past Perfect Tense, Past Perfect Continuous Tense. Hence, there exists in the English language the possibility of transferring the time relations as well as various shades of meaning expressed by būtasis kartinis laikas more precisely.Būtasis kartinis laikas can be used subjectively, i. e. for an activity or state going on at the moment of speaking or writing, or that which is likely to occur in future. The absence of the corresponding use of past tenses in English makes it necessary to convey the emotional undertone, inherent in the forms of būtasis kartinis laikas thus used, by other lexical or syntactical means.Under certain circumstances past tenses in both languages can indicate courtesy, modesty, humility, and servility on the part of the speaker or, on the other hand, his annoyance, irritation, disapproval, etc.The emotional and affective value of past tenses in both languages is most clearly revealed in the colloquial language, in fiction and, to a lesser degree, in journalistic genre. Elsewhere, i. e. in other functional styles, they are used in their purely objective function.