The acquisition of meanings resulting from telic and atelic predicates combined with -ed by L1 Chinese and Thai speakers

Aspect, internal temporal features of an event, is conveyed differently across languages. In English, situation aspect is clear due to noun phrase transparency—"kill a/the mouse" is a telic achievement with an endpoint; "kill mice" is an atelic activity without a clear endpoint. However, Thai and Chinese do not have plural morphology and allow bare nouns, leading to multiple aspectual interpretations. Moreover, English obligatorily marks viewpoint aspect through verbal inflections, i.e. the perfective -ed and the progressive -ing, while Thai and Chinese allow optional viewpoint markers. These cross-linguistic differences may pose challenges for L2 learners. Using an acceptability judgement task, this cross-sectional study examines beginner, intermediate, and advanced Thai and Chinese learners’ understanding and acquisition of the resulting meanings of (a)telic predicates marked by -ed—namely, completion, habitual activity, and single-event activity. For each test item, participants (approximately 30 per learner group and 15 English-speaking controls) read a short story and rated how naturally a target sentence captured the story on a 1-3 scale. The findings revealed that advanced learners showed performance comparable to the controls by accepting telic sentences with -ed in completion contexts and rejecting them in termination contexts. Lower-level learners’ judgement, however, indicated that they could not preempt the L1-based termination interpretations. Moreover, learners at all proficiency levels showed inconsistent ratings of (a)telic sentences relative to their appropriate contexts—habitual or single events—suggesting that L2 learners may not rely on morphosyntactic cues of the direct object noun phrases to determine predicate telicity and arrive at correct interpretations.