The Role of Focused Input on the Acquisition of Tense and *Aspect by L2 Learners of French

Cloze test results show that the experimental group exhibited a U-shaped behavior in their use of imperfective vs. perfective morphology with achievement verbs after they received the input flood. They selected more often an unbounded interpretation of achievement predicates when the context required a bounded interpretation. In contrast, no statistically significant change of scores was observed on the aspectual judgment test for their evaluation of telics in either the preterite or the imperfect. In other words, L2 representation was not affected. Overall results confirmed the leading role of lexical aspect on intermediate learners' use of tense and aspect. An important implication of this study is that the semantic complexity of the imperfect combined with the inherent semantic value of verbs affected learners' performance. Further testing is needed to investigate the effect of input that provides learners with specific combinations of grammatical and lexical aspect at the various acquisitional stages charted by the Aspect Hypothesis.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

French

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Duperron, Lucile

Contributors dc:contributor

• VanPatten, Bill

• Education, Language and Literature

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3111540

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/86267