SECOND LANGUAGE PROCESSING OF ASPECTUAL VIOLATIONS IN ENGLISH: A PILOT STUDY
SECOND LANGUAGE PROCESSING OF ASPECTUAL VIOLATIONS IN ENGLISH: A PILOT STUDY

Summary/Abstract: Grammatical aspect informs us about the internal temporal contours of a situation. In other words, aspect provides information as to how the verbal action is to be regarded, whether it is complete, continuous, or iterative. Bosnian grammaticalizes the binary system characteristic of Slavic languages that entails that verbs are marked for the perfective or the imperfective aspect. English, on the other hand, grammaticalizes the perfect and the progressive, which do not entirely correspond to the perfective/imperfective aspectual opposition. Grammatical aspect is an obligatory category in Bosnian, whilst in English, verbs need not be morphologically marked for aspect. Expectedly, studies report different processing patterns in sentences with aspectual violations in these two languages. It has been shown that native speakers of English do not show electrophysiological responses to violations of aspect, while native speakers of Bosnian show a clear sensitivity to aspectual violations immediately at the verb. Even though they detect aspectual violations already at the point of the verb in Bosnian, their L1, in this study we investigate whether university students of English process aspectual violations in English, their L2. More precisely, we conducted a self-paced reading study to explore whether Bosnian university students of English detect aspectual violations at the position of the verb or in adjacent positions during incremental sentence processing. Our results are in line with the previous findings on L1 processing of English aspect – English aspectual violations are not detected online during sentence comprehension in L2 processing. However, there is an important difference. Unlike native speakers of English, Bosnian university students of English do not detect aspectual violations even after the sentence has been processed. Such results provide evidence for the Shallow Structure Hypothesis in L2 processing. We, therefore, compare our findings with other studies on grammatical aspect, contrast L1 and L2 processing, and discuss English and Bosnian grammatical aspect.

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