The role of focused input on the acquisition of tense and aspect by L2 learners of French

Previous studies investigating the Aspect Hypothesis and its predictions about tense and aspect development suggest that L1 and L2 learners acquire the imperfect and the preterite differentially. Although they provide valuable evidence about the development of the preterite, they do not focus their analysis on the imperfect. In particular, they do not address the role of input, as articulated by the Distributional Bias Hypothesis, in the acquisition of the imperfect. This experimental study investigates the interaction between both hypotheses by measuring how focused positive evidence that provides a textually-enhanced input flood of unprototypical tokens of achievement verbs in the imparfait impacts L2 use and representation of tense and aspect. Forty-six 5th semester learners of French completed a pretest and a posttest consisting of an aspectual judgment task and a 48-item cloze test that balanced for all lexical and grammatical aspect combinations and operationalized two semantic functions of the imperfect: habit in the past, and process. This distinction aimed at exploring the role of semantic complexity on learners' use of tense and aspect. One experimental group received a four-day communicatively based input flood. One control group pursued their scheduled program with no focus on past tenses.; Cloze test results show that the experimental group exhibited a U-shaped behavior in their use of imperfective vs. perfective morphology with achievement verbs after they received the input flood. They selected more often an unbounded interpretation of achievement predicates when the context required a bounded interpretation. In contrast, no statistically significant change of scores was observed on the aspectual judgment test for their evaluation of telics in either the preterite or the imperfect. In other words, L2 representation was not affected. Overall results confirmed the leading role of lexical aspect on intermediate learners' use of tense and aspect. An important implication of this study is that the semantic complexity of the imperfect combined with the inherent semantic value of verbs affected learners' performance. Further testing is needed to investigate the effect of input that provides learners with specific combinations of grammatical and lexical aspect at the various acquisitional stages charted by the Aspect Hypothesis.