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Roberts, Leah orcid.org/0000-0002-5666-6667 and Liszka, Sarah (2013) Processing
tense/aspect-agreement violations on-line in the second language : a self-paced reading
study with French and German L2 learners of English. Second Language Research. 413–
439. ISSN 0267-6583
https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658313503171
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Second Language Research
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DOI: 10.1177/0267658313503171
2013 29: 413Second Language Research
Leah Roberts and Sarah Ann Liszka
English
oflanguage: A self-paced reading study with French and German L2 learners
Processing tense/aspect-agreement violations on-line in the second
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Second Language Research
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DOI: 10.1177/0267658313503171
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second
language
research
Processing tense/aspect-
agreement violations on-
line in the second language:
A self-paced reading study
with French and German L2
learners of English
Leah Roberts
University of York, UK
Sarah Ann Liszka
University of Greenwich, UK
Abstract
In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate
the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second
language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and
the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *Last week, James has gone swimming every day) in their on-line
comprehension. The L2 learners were equally able to distinguish correctly the past simple from
the present perfect as measured by a traditional cloze test production task. They were also both
able to assess the mismatch items as less acceptable than the match items in an off-line judgment
task. Using a self-paced reading task, we investigated whether they could access this knowledge
during real-time processing. Despite performing similarly in the explicit tasks, the two learner
groups processed the experimental items differently from each other in real time. On-line, only
the French L2 learners were sensitive to the mismatch conditions in both the past simple and the
present perfect contexts, whereas the German L2 learners did not show a processing cost at all
for either mismatch type. We suggest that the performance differences between the L2 groups
can be explained by influences from the learners’ first language (L1): namely, only those whose L1
has grammaticized aspect (French) were sensitive to the tense/aspect violations on-line, and thus
could be argued to have implicit knowledge of English tense/aspect distinctions.
Keywords
aspect, syntactic processing, tense, transfer
Corresponding author:
Leah Roberts, Centre for Language Learning Research, Department of Education, University of York,
Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: leah.roberts@york.ac.uk
503171SLR29410.1177/0267658313503171Second Language ResearchRoberts and Liszka
2013
Article
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414 Second Language Research 29(4)
I Introduction
In the field of second language (L2) acquisition research, the acquisition of tense and
aspect has long been a topic of intensive investigation (for overviews, see for example
Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Slabakova, 2002). This is unsurprising given that temporal
expression is fundamental to communication, yet its formal and functional marking
varies dramatically from language to language. The acquisition of tense and aspect is
therefore a core task for all language learners. From earlier research, in particular data
from corpus studies and acceptability judgment tasks, we know much about learners’
production of tense/aspect distinctions and of tense/aspect morphology in develop-
ment both at early and more advanced stages of L2 acquisition, and more recently
about how L2 learners interpret target language tense/aspect distinctions in general.
However, little is known about the nature of learners’ knowledge of the grammatical
marking of tense and aspect once it is observed off-line. In other words, it is unclear
whether the knowledge that learners display can be applied automatically in real-time
comprehension. This is a topic that can be conceptualized in terms of the debate in the
field on the nature of ‘implicit’ versus ‘explicit’ knowledge (e.g. R. Ellis, 2005), and is
an important issue because language acquisition is a complex task that requires both
the acquisition of knowledge as well as the ability to put this knowledge to use in real
time. Focusing on the latter, in this article we investigate whether French and German
L2 learners of English are sensitive to mismatches in agreement between fronted tem-
poral adverbials (e.g. Initially/Since last week) and the tense/aspect of immediately
following verbs (ate/has eaten) as shown in (1), in their on-line comprehension of the
target language.
(1) a. Initially, the cat ate/*has eaten only fish.
b. Since last week, the cat *ate/has eaten only fish.
Both French and German have a compound past (the passé composé/the Perfekt)
1
which
is similar in surface form to the present perfect in English (have + past participle).
However, both French and German contrast with English in that the English present
perfect cannot be used with an adverbial specifying definite past time (e.g. Yesterday I
have danced all night; cf. ‘the present perfect puzzle’, Klein, 1992). On the other hand,
French and English pattern together and both differently from German in that aspect is
grammaticized in the former, but not in the latter language, a difference that may impact
L2 processing (Papadopoulou et al., 2008). In the current study, we investigate the poten-
tial role of the learners’ first language in their ability to put their (explicit) knowledge of
English tense and aspect – as measured by traditional off-line production tasks – to use
in on-line comprehension.
Before reporting the details of the current experiment and the results, we consider
what is meant by implicit and explicit knowledge. We then briefly present an overview
on the cross-linguistic expression of tense/aspect, summarize findings on the study of the
acquisition of tense/aspect in the L2 with particular reference to first language (L1) influ-
ences, and present a brief review of the processing of tense/aspect in real-time
comprehension.
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Roberts and Liszka 415
1 Implicit and explicit knowledge
The distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge refers to whether or not that
knowledge is intuitive and available for automatic processing (implicit), or con-
sciously available through effortful, controlled processing (explicit) (e.g. R. Ellis et
al., 2006; Hulstijn, 2005). According to Tokowicz and MacWhinney (2005: 178)
types of explicit knowledge include similarities between the L1–L2 pairings, and
explicit grammar rules, which can be exploited by L2 learners when making linguis-
tic judgements. As such, experimental tasks such as off-line grammaticality judg-
ment tasks (GJTs) are typically considered conducive to testing and measuring this
type of knowledge (e.g. R. Ellis, 2005; Tokowicz and MacWhinney, 2005). On the
other hand, as learners cannot consciously tap into their implicit knowledge, on-line
tasks such as real-time spontaneous oral production tasks (e.g. R. Ellis, 2005) and
event-related potential (ERP) responses in sentence comprehension tasks (e.g.
Tokowicz and MacWhinney, 2005) are considered appropriate for measuring implicit
knowledge (e.g. R. Ellis, 2005). In this spirit, we test explicit knowledge using an
untimed GJT and implicit knowledge using a self-paced reading task in an attempt to
give a better understanding of how learners use their knowledge in on-and off-line
comprehension.
2 Temporal adverbs and temporal verbal morphology
According to (Klein, 1994)
2
past, present and future tense is established by the temporal
relation between the topic time (TT) and the time of the utterance (TU), and this abstract
temporal relation may or may not be grammatically marked, for instance by verbal mor-
phology. Klein distinguishes the topic time from the situation time (TSit): both are time
spans, but the former relates to the time (past, present, future) for which an assertion is
made (e.g. I had danced – past time – before TU), and the latter, which is associated with
the non-finite part of the utterance, refers to the time span at which the situation occurs.
Aspect in this system is established by the relationship between the topic time and the
situation time, creating temporal relations such as BEFORE, AFTER, (partly)
SIMULTANEOUS (in ‘I had danced’, the TT is AFTER the time of the situation (TSit)
dance).
Lexical devices such as temporal adverbs can also mark such temporal relations.
Temporal adverbs can specify the internal and the external properties of a time span, and
also, as shown in (2) below they can modify either the TT (yesterday) or the TSit (all
night), depending on their position in a sentence.
(2) Yesterday, I slept all night.
Languages differ in how these temporal relations are established, ranging from languages
with mandatory marking of tense and aspect, to those with no such marking but a full
repertoire of temporal adverbials. For instance, and relevant to the current study, in
German, French, and English, tense is mandatorily marked grammatically. For example,
(3a–c) below demonstrate the present simple in English, French and German. In terms of
preterit meaning in English it is realized by the past simple (3d). French also has a past
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