Contribution to Book
Processing of Aspectual Meanings by Non-Native and Native English Speakers during Narrative Comprehension
New Approaches in English Lingistics: Building Bridges
(2016)
Abstract
Languages have unique systems of language forms, meanings, and conventions for expressing narratives and temporal structure, grammatical aspect and its meaning and use being part of it. In second-language acquisition, little is known what temporal concepts and concurrent forms are comprehended at certain development stages and whether resulting mental representations are similar between native and non-native adult English speakers. In this study, we investigate whether readers attend to semantic content and draw causal inferences. Advanced non-native, unlike native, readers appear to not notice aspectual meanings and, apparently, the input is not cognitively registered; implicit learning of aspect seems unlikely. In native readers, aspect affects the availability of situations enabling causal inferencing, and imperfective aspect appears to be mentally stored in-focus.
Keywords
- grammatical and lexical aspect,
- narrative processes,
- aspectual meanings,
- language acquisition,
- text comprehension
Disciplines
Publication Date
2016
Editor
lga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja and Sarah Chevalier
Publisher
John Benjamins
Series
Studies in Language Companion Series
ISBN
9789027259424
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/slcs.177.10sch
Citation Information
Andreas Schramm and Michael Mensink. "Processing of Aspectual Meanings by Non-Native and Native English Speakers during Narrative Comprehension" AmsterdamNew Approaches in English Lingistics: Building Bridges (2016) p. 251 - 280 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/andreas-schramm/4/