East Asian Linguistics Workshop: "Semantic bias in the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: Universals?" by Yasuhiro Shirai

Abstract:

This talk outlines the current state of the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994; Shirai & Andersen, 1995), which predicts that learners are strongly influenced by lexical aspect in acquiring tense and aspect markers in L1 and L2; namely, past perfective markers are associated with telic verbs (achievements and accomplishments) while general imperfective markers are associated with atelic verbs (states and activities) and progressive markers with activity verbs. Although there has been a general agreement on this association pattern as a universal tendency (e.g., Shirai, Slobin, & Weist, 1998; Andersen & Shirai, 1994; Shirai, 2009), explanations for these tendencies are still controversial. I will argue that the cases that go against the predicted tendencies—namely, Japanese (Shirai, 1998) and Inuktitut (Swift, 2004) in L1 and Japanese (Ishida, 2004) and Russian (Martelle, 2012) in L2—support the input-based explanation (i.e., the Distributional Bias Hypothesis, Andersen, 1993). The acquisition of Chinese (Tong & Shirai, 2016) and Korean (Ryu & Shirai, 2022) will also be discussed.  

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Yasuhiro Shirai is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include first and second language acquisition of grammatical constructions, in particular of tense-aspect and relative clauses, and cognitive models of language acquisition and processing. He has (co-)authored and (co-)edited more than ten books/special issues of journals, including The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect (Mouton de Gruyter), Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics: Japanese (Cambridge University Press) and Connectionism and Second Language Acquisition (Routledge). He is Associate Editor of First Language (Sage) and Frontiers in Psychology.