Effects of Lexical Aspect on the Interlanguage of Ibibio ESL Learners: Later than Sooner

The main objective of this paper is to test the major prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis on interlanguage narratives collected from 171 Ibibio ESL learners in a classroom setting using sets of picture stories. Aspect Hypothesis predicts that lexical aspectual classes of verbs would determine the pattern of acquisition and distribution of tense-aspect morphology at the very early stages of L2 acquisition of tense-aspect verbal morphology. That is, telic verbs would be marked with the past tense-aspect verbal morphology before atelic verbs in the interlanguage of ESL learners irrespective of their L1 background. The results of our data analyses show a significant effect from the lexical aspect on the acquisition and distribution of tense-aspect morphology with chi-square statistics of ($x^2=196.92$,df = 6, n = 1664, p = <.0001). However, the effect of the lexical aspect is shown to be more prominent among Ibibio ESL learners at higher levels of proficiency. This is contrary to the prediction regarding Aspect Hypothesis. The paper concludes that the influence of the lexical aspect on the pattern of acquisition and distribution of tense-aspect morphology may be universal but the actual point along the developmental pathway when such influence is obtainable is yet to be determined. This calls for more research into the pattern of the L2 acquisition of tense-aspect verbal morphology.