Disentangling aspect and tense in L2 acquisition

This article reports on an empirical study investigating the second language (L2) acquisition of the Chinese perfective markers le and guo and their aspectual/temporal features by English-speaking learners, under the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis ( Lardiere, 2008 , 2009 ). English lacks dedicated perfective markers, whereas Chinese is rich in aspect marking but has no morphologically realised tense. This study provides a feature-based account of the Chinese perfective markers le and guo and their English corresponding forms (the simple past tense -ed and the present perfect). An acceptability judgment task, a multiple-choice task, and an online sentence completeness judgment task were conducted on 65 L2 learners of three proficiency levels and 25 Chinese natives. Our findings are largely compatible with the predictions of the FRH. It is found that a complex mapping between the L1 tense and L2 aspect markers can lead to persistent learning challenges. Le is more difficult to acquire than guo as the acquisition of le involves a more intricate feature reassembly process. L2 learners must disentangle and reconfigure aspectual and temporal features in the L2 feature sets, while also distinguishing between different aspect markers in L2 Chinese.