Processing of aspectual meanings by non-native and native English speakers during narrative comprehension
Languages have unique systems of language forms, meanings, and conventions for expressing narratives and temporal structure, grammatical aspect and its meaning and use being part of it. In second-language acquisition, little is known what temporal concepts and concurrent forms are comprehended at certain development stages and whether resulting mental representations are similar between native and non-native adult English speakers. In this study, we investigate whether readers attend to semantic content and draw causal inferences. Advanced non-native, unlike native, readers appear to not notice aspectual meanings and, apparently, the input is not cognitively registered; implicit learning of aspect seems unlikely. In native readers, aspect affects the availability of situations enabling causal inferencing, and imperfective aspect appears to be mentally stored in-focus.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Second language acquisition
- 3.Linguistic theory of aspect
- 4.Cognitive processing of aspect
- 5.The present study
-
6.Method
- 6.1Participants
- 6.2Design
- 6.3Passages
- 6.4Procedure
- 7.Results
- 7.1Moment-to-moment processing
- 7.2Off-line processing
- 8.Discussion
- 8.1Moment-to-moment processing
- 8.2Off-line processing
- 9.General discussion and conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
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