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Aspectual influences on early tense comprehension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2002

LAURA WAGNER
LAURA WAGNER
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

This study investigated the ASPECT FIRST HYPOTHESIS which claims that children initially use verbal morphology to mark aspect and not tense. Experiment 1 tested 46 two- and three-year-old children's comprehension of tense as it is marked in the auxiliary system using a sentence-to-scene matching task. Children were presented with multiple performances of the same event and asked where a character is V'ing, was V'ing and is gonna V. Results showed that even the two-year-old children could successfully understand tense in this experiment. Experiment 2 changed the information available in the scenes by varying whether or not the past-time event reached its completion point. Thirty-six two-, three- and four-year-old children participated. The results showed that the two-year-olds could only successfully understand past and present auxiliaries when past-time information in the scenes was co-extensive with completion information in the scenes. This result suggests that these children may be making a grammatical aspect (perfective/imperfective) judgment and not a tense (past/present) judgment, or at least, that grammatical aspect influences tense interpretation for these children.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 2001 , pp. 661 - 681
Copyright
2001 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

My thanks go to Lila Gleitman, Robin Clark, Henry Gleitman, Ed Kako, Angeliek van Hout, Jesse Snedeker, Dan Reynolds, the Cheese/Babylab group, and the UMass Developmental Seminar and Language Acquisition Lab. This research was funded by a graduate fellowship from the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and by a faculty research grant from the University of Massachusetts. Parts of this work have been presented at the 23rd Annual BU Conference on Language Development and at the 2000 Linguistics Society of America annual conference.