Tense and aspect in language acquisition

Tense and aspect characterize the event conveyed by the predicate. Tense situates events or activities in time with respect to the moment of speaking and a reference point whereas aspect refers to the internal temporal composition of a situation (Comrie, Reference Comrie1976). A series of studies in L1 acquisition (e.g., Antinucci & Miller, Reference Antinucci and Miller1976; Berman & Slobin, Reference Berman and Slobin1994) have documented the developmental patterns of grammatical aspect such that L1 learners initially produce perfective forms more frequently than imperfective forms. This observation could be attributable to the claim that children are not cognitively ready to conceive events in terms of time reference but can only encode reference to the here and now (see Antinucci & Miller, Reference Antinucci and Miller1976; Weist et al. Reference Weist, Wysocka and Lyytinen1991 for the defective tense hypothesis). The earlier acquisition of the perfective aspect over the imperfective form has also been observed in L2 acquisition (Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000; Kang et al., Reference Kang, Kim and Christianson2019; Shirai & Andersen, Reference Shirai and Andersen1995).

Early verbal morphology in L1 and L2 acquisition is primarily guided by aspectual characteristics of the verbs or predicates, or the situation they describe, as stipulated in the aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, Reference Andersen and Shirai1994; Andreou & Tsimpli, Reference Andreou and Tsimpli2017; Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig1995, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000; Kang et al., Reference Kang, Kim and Christianson2019; Shirai & Andersen, Reference Shirai and Andersen1995). The lexical aspect is categorized into four distinct types in light of durativity and telicity: accomplishment, achievement, activity, and stative (Vendler, Reference Vendler1967). In line with the aspect hypothesis, Andreou and Tsimpli (Reference Andreou and Tsimpli2017), for instance, reported that three groups of 8- to 12-year-olds (Greek monolingual, Greek-German bilingual, and Greek-English bilingual) showed their preference for perfective aspect with accomplishment and achievement predicates although a difference was observed in the three groups when it came to the use of imperfective forms. Compared to monolingual Greek children and Greek-German bilingual children, Greek-English bilingual children had problems with the use of imperfective forms in conjunction with activity and state predicates. The distributional differences in the production of imperfectives between Greek-German and Greek-English children were taken as evidence for the cross-linguistic influences. The finding that monolingual Greek children and Greek-German children showed similar results in the frequency of use of imperfective verb forms was taken to suggest that cross-linguistic influence is facilitated by the fact that German lacks morphological aspect while English makes a progressive distinction.

In addition to the primacy of aspect in early verbal morphology, cross-linguistic influences have drawn much attention in the language acquisition literature (Andreou & Tsimpli, Reference Andreou and Tsimpli2017; Blom et al., Reference Blom, Chondrogianni, Marinis and Vasić2016; van Dijk et al., Reference Van Dijk, Van Wonderen, Koutamanis, Kootstra, Dijkstra and Unsworth2021). Blom et al. (Reference Blom, Chondrogianni, Marinis and Vasić2016), for instance, examined the child L2 acquisition of verbal morphology by comparing accuracy and error patterns in verbal agreement markings in L2 Dutch versus L2 Greek between two groups of children whose L1 was Turkish. While the Greek L2 children showed higher accuracy and more frequent use of first person compared to third person, the Dutch L2 children demonstrated the reverse. The observed differences between the two groups were attributed to differences in phonological properties of the target language. For Dutch, phonological factors predicted higher accuracy of the unmarked first person singular than the phonologically marked second/third person singular and plural. The Greek L2 children, on the other hand, showed differences between first/third person and the second person. This finding was interpreted as evidence for the interaction of universal predictions about the morphological acquisition and L2 properties in accounting for cross-linguistic differences in the acquisition of different target languages.

In a recent meta-analysis of experimental studies on child bilingualism of various language combinations, Van Dijk et al (Reference Van Dijk, Van Wonderen, Koutamanis, Kootstra, Dijkstra and Unsworth2021) reported a significant small to moderate average effect size of cross-linguistic influence. Their study further uncovered that language dominance, referred to as societal language, was a significant predictor of cross-linguistic influence although the type of structural overlap between bilingual children’s languages, language domain, and children’s age were not. Of note is that cross-linguistic influence was stronger from children’s dominant language into their non-dominant language than vice versa. In other words, the effect of cross-linguistic difference was significant only in the production of children’s non-dominant language, but not in that of children’s dominant language.

Another related issue addressed in the literature concerns the effects of research methods and tasks on obtained results in the acquisition and use of L2 tense and aspect. Previous studies on child acquisition of L2 tense and aspect have tended to use naturally occurring data or elicited production (e.g., Andreou & Tsimpli, Reference Andreou and Tsimpli2017; Berman & Slobin, Reference Berman and Slobin1994; Blom et al., Reference Blom, Chondrogianni, Marinis and Vasić2016; Lee, Reference Lee2001). Andreou and Tsimpli (Reference Andreou and Tsimpli2017), for example, adopted a retell task to elicit the oral production of perfective and imperfective aspect in Greek among three groups of 8- to 12-year-old children: Greek-German and Greek-English bilingual children and Greek monolingual children. After listening to the story played with pictures on the computer screen, the children were asked to retell the story and their recorded stories with no picture stimuli were analyzed in terms of verbal morphology in relation to lexical semantics. Lee (Reference Lee2001) also used pictures to elicit L2 learners’ production of tense and aspect forms in a longitudinal study on two L1 Korean learners of L2 English (14 years and 10 years at the time of the first visit) over the course of two years.

While the naturalistic production data and the picture description tasks were effective for understanding learners’ spontaneous capacity to describe events and situations, the utterances from these sources tend to be limited to isolated phrases and sentences, especially those at a young age. Although the previous research employed narrative discourse as an instrument to elicit learners’ spontaneous production of verb forms, comparatively little research has considered discourse organization as a potential factor that shapes the choices and distribution of verbal morphology. Among the few studies that used extended discourse production are a collection of studies (e.g., Berman & Slobin, Reference Berman and Slobin1994; Strömqvist & Verhoeven, Reference Strömqvist and Verhoeven2004) that relied on a wordless story book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, Reference Mayer1969) to elicit learner production. Despite the variation in focus, most of the studies included in these collections illustrate the development of linguistic means to relate events and organize them into coherent structures at the levels of episode, scene, and overall plot in a narrative. In the following section, an overview of the literature regarding narrative organization is provided in relation to the use and development of verbal morphology.

Narrative organization in the distribution of verbal morphology: The discourse hypothesis

While much research has examined learners’ use of tense and aspect markers influenced by cross-linguistic differences (e.g., Andreou & Tsimpli, Reference Andreou and Tsimpli2017; Blom et al., Reference Blom, Chondrogianni, Marinis and Vasić2016; van Dijk et al., Reference Van Dijk, Van Wonderen, Koutamanis, Kootstra, Dijkstra and Unsworth2021) or the inherent nature of a verb or predicate (Andersen & Shirai, Reference Andersen and Shirai1994; Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig1995, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé2020; Salaberry & Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Salaberry and Comajoan-Colomé2013), relatively little research has linked the use of such marking to discourse organization. A functionalist line of scholarship (e.g., Berman & Slobin, Reference Berman and Slobin1994; Hopper, Reference Hopper and Givón1979; Slobin & Bocaz, Reference Slobin and Bocaz1988; Strömqvist & Verhoeven, Reference Strömqvist and Verhoeven2004) put forward that a differentiation of tense and aspect marking is associated with a distinction between plot-advancing foreground events and commentary and evaluative background information in narrative. While perfective forms of a verb are more likely to occur in foregrounded clauses, imperfective forms tend to occur in backgrounded clauses.

Among the factors that influence the distribution of verbal morphology is narrative discourse as a linguistic context in which learners must (learn to) use verbs and predicates. Discourse organization that entails foreground and background has been studied as a potential factor in learners’ grammatical aspect choices. Whereas a foreground clause normally conveys new information, helping to develop a storyline, the background does not typically carry main events; instead, it provides supplementary information that elaborates on the events given in the foreground (Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000; Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Comajoan-Colomé, Salaberry and Comajoan-Colomé2013; Hopper, Reference Hopper and Givón1979; Slobin & Bocaz, Reference Slobin and Bocaz1988). It has further been documented that “the most basic narratives by lower-level learners” largely consist of foreground, with little or no background information (Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000, p. 281). Backgrounding tends to occupy the beginning of a text by means of the past progressive and other non-simple past forms, whereas foregrounding advances a storyline with simple past forms (Hopper, Reference Hopper and Givón1979). A narrative is interwoven with a series of foregrounded clauses in the perfective, with intermixed background clauses in the imperfective, providing information about characters, setting of a situation, and a narrator’s perspective on the situation, sometimes not known to characters (Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Comajoan-Colomé, Salaberry and Comajoan-Colomé2013; Slobin & Bocaz, Reference Slobin and Bocaz1988). Proficient language users tend to use the simple past for foregrounding a story while relying on varied forms of tense aspect markers for backgrounding that include the past progressive and other non-simple past forms, as well as the simple past.

The acquisition of the grammar of narrative would require the learner to be able to identify the plot-advancing line of the story and to link the semantic task to map the foreground onto linguistic forms. The learner would also have to add background information by choosing to use imperfective verb forms. Foreground and background in narrative are “not given by the pictures but are constructed by the narrator” (Berman & Slobin, Reference Berman and Slobin1994, p. 7). Although the pictures in Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, Reference Mayer1969) are presented in a standardized manner on the basis of an objective logic of events and situations, the learner would have to seek grammatical means to encode the plotline of the story and decide on linguistic means for differentiating background situations from foreground. They are also driven by narrators’ perspectives, by which the narrator guides the listening in a subjective interpretation of the chain of events, with increasing attention to certain points. Previous studies (e.g., Shapiro & Hudson, Reference Shapiro and Hudson1991; Slabakova & Montrul, Reference Slabakova, Montrul, Liceras, Zobl and Goodluck2007; Uccelli, Reference Uccelli2009) show that picture-elicited stories are told in the past tense to convey that the events have already taken place while the present tense is reserved for the narrator’s commentary, and that the emergence of past tense in learners’ picture-elicited narratives is taken as evidence for language development. For instance, Shapiro and Hudson (Reference Shapiro and Hudson1991) compared English-speaking preschoolers and first graders in terms of linguistic complexity and found that first graders showed more frequent use of past tense forms than preschoolers in storytelling elicited through pictures. Elicited production of language at the level of the extended discourse may help assess the language production directly from a narrator.

While much research has examined the acquisition of tense and aspect markers in adult L2 learning (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig1995, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé2020; Salaberry & Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Salaberry and Comajoan-Colomé2013), scant research exists with respect to young learners’ learning of tense and aspect marking. To expand the scholarship in this area, the current study examined young learners of L2 English enrolled in dual language programs in the United States whose language learning trajectories are distinct from the learner populations widely studied in the L2 literature. Transitional bilingual programs are often populated by children who were exposed to their L2s during early childhood and those who were exposed to more than one language from birth (see Hammer et al., Reference Hammer, Hoff, Uchikoshi, Gillanders, Castro and Sandilos2014 for an overview). A growing body of literature has documented the varied aspects of language and literacy development unique to such learners, including grammatical development. Although much research has supported the conceptualization that dual language learners operate using two independent systems (see Hammer et al., Reference Hammer, Hoff, Uchikoshi, Gillanders, Castro and Sandilos2014), relatively little is known with respect to the fine-grained nature of L2 developmental trajectories, such as the development of the L2 tense and aspect system in relation to narrative organization. The following section describes the research questions and data collection and analysis in detail.

Participants

Thirty-eight children who spoke either Cantonese or Spanish as their home language (22 Cantonese and 16 Spanish; 21 boys and 17 girls) enrolled in transitional bilingual programs in three schools in an urban school district in Northern California were evaluated. District demographics and school data indicated that 75% or more of the students in these schools qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of socio-economic status in the United States, which suggests that most children in this study were from low-income households. The three schools were chosen because they offered both Cantonese–English and Spanish–English transitional bilingual programs that transitioned children into mainstream classes by third grade. All children were enrolled in transitional bilingual programs in which they were provided instruction in their home language (Cantonese or Spanish) as they acquired English. In kindergarten, children had 90% of their instruction in their home language and 10% in English. By the end of second grade, children in the Spanish programs had 60–80% of their instruction in English, with the remaining instruction time in their home language. Children in the Cantonese programs tended to have more English instructional time, amounting to 90% time in English and the remaining time in Cantonese. The children were recruited in the fall of kindergarten and followed longitudinally for 3 years.

Most of the parents were first-generation immigrants, although most of the children were born in the United States. All children had either Cantonese or Spanish as their home language and were identified as English learners on the California English Language Development Test (CELDT). The children were first exposed to English at age 2.8 years old on average. Although there was no significant difference between the groups, the mean age of first exposure to English was 2.6 years for the L1 Cantonese children and 3.1 years for the L1 Spanish children. On average, at the beginning of kindergarten, both L1 Cantonese- and L1 Spanish-speaking children scored more than one standard deviation below the published means on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-3 (Dunn & Dunn, Reference Dunn and Dunn1997) that measures their receptive English vocabulary. By second grade, their scores increased and were around one standard deviation below the published means. There were no differences between the groups on their English receptive vocabulary scores at the start of kindergarten, t (36) = −1.06, p = .30, and in the spring of second grade, t (36) = −2.01, p = .05. The mean age when they were assessed in kindergarten was 64 months, in Grade 1 was 80 months, and in Grade 2 was 92 months. Based on parental questionnaire answers, there were no significant differences in maternal education between the Cantonese–English and Spanish–English groups, t (35) = 1.40, p = .17. On average, the mothers had some high school education. Additionally, based on parental questionnaire answers, there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of the age of English acquisition, t (33) = −1.19, p = .24.

Data collection and coding

English narratives were elicited through a wordless picture book, Frog, Where are You?, (Mayer, Reference Mayer1969), which is a widely used measure for children’s oral proficiency (e.g., Miller et al., Reference Miller, Heilmann, Nockerts, Iglesias, Fabiano and Francis2006). The oral elicitation task was administered individually to all children in a quiet space at school each year in the fall of kindergarten, spring of Grade 1, and spring of Grade 2. The children were asked to look at the pictures in the book and then tell a story in English to a native-English-speaking assessor. The children were encouraged to look at the pictures while they told their stories. All narratives were audio-recorded and later transcribed and verified by native-English-speaking research assistants. A sample of three narrative segments produced by a Spanish-English bilingual child at the three points of time is presented in Appendix.

The oral narratives were analyzed, with an emphasis on verb predicates in relation to narrative organization. First, each occurrence of a verbal predicate was coded in terms of grounding: background and foreground. Following the distinction between the two stipulated in the literature (Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig1995, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000; Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Comajoan-Colomé, Salaberry and Comajoan-Colomé2013; Dry, Reference Dry1983; Hopper, Reference Hopper and Givón1979; Slobin & Bocaz, Reference Slobin and Bocaz1988), clauses that moved the storyline forward with new, salient information were coded as “foreground.” By contrast, clauses that carried additional, non-salient information used to support the storyline were marked as “background.” The coding of grounding was carried out on the basis of the meanings and functions of each clause in connection with the storyline, independent of verbal morphology or syntactic structure of a clause as a main or subordinate clause (see Comajoan-Colomé, Reference Comajoan-Colomé, Salaberry and Comajoan-Colomé2013). Contrary to the main story presented in chronological order in the foreground, all the information needed to understand the story—such as description, generalization, and other additional details about events, scenes, and characters in the story—was regarded as background (see Slobin & Bocaz, Reference Slobin and Bocaz1988). Coding background and foreground in children’s narratives were relatively clear-cut as the narratives were produced through the picture book and there was no intervention from the research assistant as the interlocutor. A coding example of foreground and background with the examples from a bilingual child’s narratives at kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 is given in Appendix.

Next, each verb was coded either as past or non-past tense, and then the verbs were coded further for verbal morphology, such as the simple past, past progressive, and pluperfect for past forms and the present, base, zero-progressive, present perfect, present progressive, and other for non-past forms, as summarized in Table 1.

Table 1.

Coding categories for verb tense forms

Following the coding scheme used in Bardovi-Harlig’s (Reference Bardovi-Harlig1995, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2001) works, care was taken in analyzing the occurrences of verb forms guided by the research questions. In coding and calculating the distribution of the appropriate use of the past tense, verbs were first split into regular verbs (e.g., jump/jumped, walk/walked) and irregular verbs (e.g., come/came, run/ran). Propositions that required but lacked verbs were coded as “no verb” (e.g., the boy happy) and counted as either foreground or background depending on the meaning of the phrase. Verbs that have the same form for the past and base were excluded from the sample (e.g., hit, put, let). However, when these verbs were inflected (e.g., the boy puts his boots on), they were coded accordingly (e.g., simple present for “puts”).

When a learner repeated the identical form of a verb, it was counted only once to avoid inflating the number of propositions in the oral narratives (e.g., the boy jumped, the little boy jumped). When a verb form was repeated but not in the same form, the ratio of forms was calculated. For instance, when a learner produced, “the boy came, the boy come, the boy comes,” the total number of verbs was 1.0 and the ratios for the simple past (e.g., “came”), simple present (e.g., “comes”), and uninflected base forms (e.g., “come”) were 0.33 each. Learner production of modal verbs (e.g., can, could, should) was excluded from the analysis. Finally, the overgeneralized use of the past tense morpheme for an irregular verb (e.g., the boy finded the dog) was coded as simple past. Any utterances that were not directly relevant to the storyline were excluded from the analysis, such as “the end” at the end of the children’s story productions, the children’s questions, and their responses to the research assistants’ requests for elaboration. All the verbs produced by a total of 38 children over 3 time points were coded by 2 trained research assistants. When disagreement occurred between the two, Kang reviewed and decided on coding. The inter-coder reliability was calculated using Cohen’s kappa. For grounding, it was .73, and for the verbal morphology, it was .96.