Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents

Distinct from English, Mandarin verbs are not inflected to encode Past Tense, but perfective aspect is typically marked by aspectual markers -le and -guo. Moreover, resultative verb compounds are often viewed as accomplishment verbs, denoting telicity of an event. This study attempts to examine whether such linguistic properties transfer to the acquisition of English. We tested 22 English learning Chinese adolescents in two experiments, respectively using a Story Restatements Task and an Elicited Production Task. Overall, the experiments generated three major findings. First, the participants marked irregular verbs 13 % higher than regular ones. Second, the participants used bare verbs to express English Past Tense 12 % of the situations. Third, the participants adopted Mandarin-like RVCs to denote English Past Tense 10 % of the cases. Taken together, the findings indicate that besides morphophonological transfer, English learning Chinese adolescents adopt Mandarin word-formation rules to encode English Past Tense, which is new evidence of cross-linguistic transfer. We discuss the implications of our findings.