The acquisition of tense-aspect in L3 for Taiwanese speakers of Spanish

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the inter-language development of the Spanish past tense by Taiwanese learners who learned Spanish as a second foreign language. The analysis of this study was based on the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis, which focuses on the inherent lexical aspect of verbs. We came to the following conclusions. (1) Taiwanese learners, whose first language was Mandarin Chinese, demonstrated more accurate uses of the Spanish preterite than the imperfect in written texts at their early stages of development. The acquisition of the lexical aspects of verbs in the preterite in terms of lexical aspect demonstrated the following order: achievement + accomplishment, activity and finally stative, whereas the acquisition of the imperfect showed the opposite sequence. (2) In the majority of the cases, the Taiwanese learners of Spanish demonstrated a similar pattern of acquisition of the Spanish past tense in terms of lexical aspect as that of English-speaking learner of Spanish. This paper will end with discussions on pedagogical implications of the findings and we hope this study will shed light on the current research on the second language acquisition of the Spanish tense/aspect.