The development of past tense verbal morphology in classroom L2 Spanish

Previous research (e.g. Andersen 1986, 1991; Bardovi-Harlig and Bergstrom 1996; Robison 1990, 1995) has shown that the development of aspectual distinctions (inflectional morphology) among adult second language learners is associated with lexical aspect. The present study analyzed the development of Past tense verbal morphology in L2 Spanish among 20 college-level L1 English students. Four native speakers acted as a control group. The study was based on the analysis of oral movie narratives collected at two different times two months apart. The results of the study show that the lexical aspectual semantics of the verb phrase have an increasing influence on the selection of verbal endings throughout development of the L2. In contrast, for the lowest-level learners represented in this study the effect of lexical aspect is minimal compared to the effect of tense contrasts.