L2 processing of tense/aspect agreement violations

Abstract

This study investigated how advanced Korean L2 learners of English process two types of verb tenses (past simple and present perfect). Specifically, it examined whether the participants are sensitive to tense/aspect violations, replicating Roberts and Liszka’s (2013) study with single target sentences (e.g., *Three days ago, Tom has felt unwell.). The Korean L2 learners of English with a competent level of explicit knowledge distinguished the morphological usage of the past simple form from the present perfect form of verbs in the fill-in-the-blanks task. Their possession of the explicit knowledge was again confirmed by an off-line acceptability judgment task; as demonstrated by the native speakers of English, the advanced L2 learners evaluated the mismatch items far less acceptable than the match items in both the past simple and the present perfect constructions. In the self-paced reading task conducted to test the participants’ ability to reflect their judgments in on-line processing (i.e., implicit knowledge), however, L2 learners were slower than native speakers of English and they, in particular, revealed the marginal sensitivity to tense/aspect agreement violations for the present perfect type. The results were discussed in terms of L2 learners’ selective integration (Jiang 2004, 2007).