• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.459-483
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• 2016

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.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.23-36
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• 2024

This research centers on the Taiwan Eye-Movement Corpus of Spanish (TECS), a specially created corpus comprising eye-tracking data from Chinese-speaking learners of Spanish as a third language in Taiwan. Its primary purpose is to explore the broad utility of TECS in understanding language learning processes, particularly the initial stages of language learning. Constructing this corpus involves gathering data on eye-tracking, reading comprehension, and language proficiency to develop a machine-learning model that predicts learner behaviors, and subsequently undergoes a predictability test for validation. The focus is on examining attention in input processing and their relationship to language learning outcomes. The TECS eye-tracking data consists of indicators derived from eye movement recordings while reading Spanish sentences with temporal references. These indicators are obtained from eye movement experiments focusing on tense verbal inflections and temporal adverbs. Chinese expresses tense using aspect markers, lexical references, and contextual cues, differing significantly from inflectional languages like Spanish. Chinese-speaking learners of Spanish face particular challenges in learning verbal morphology and tenses. The data from eye movement experiments were structured into feature vectors, with learner behaviors serving as class labels. After categorizing the collected data, we used two types of machine learning methods for classification and regression: Random Forests and the k-nearest neighbors algorithm (KNN). By leveraging these algorithms, we predicted learner behaviors and conducted performance evaluations to enhance our understanding of the nexus between learner behaviors and language learning process. Future research may further enrich TECS by gathering data from subsequent eye-movement experiments, specifically targeting various Spanish tenses and temporal lexical references during text reading. These endeavors promise to broaden and refine the corpus, advancing our understanding of language processing.