The Acquisition of Imperfective Aspect Marking in Korean as a Second Language by Japanese Learners

The Acquisition of Imperfective Aspect Marking in Korean as a Second Language by Japanese Learners Ju-yeon Ryu a, Kaoru Horie b, and Yasuhiro Shirai c aDepartment of Cross-cultural Education, Tohoku University, 41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8576 Japan juyeon1212@mail.tains.tohoku.ac.jp bDepartment of Applied Linguistics, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya-shi, Nagoya, 464-0601 Japan horie@lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp cDepartment of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, 2801 Cathedral of Learning Pittsburgh, PA 15260 yshirai@pitt.edu Abstract. This paper investigates the developmental process through which L2 learners acquire two „imperfective‟ aspect markers in Korean, -ko iss- (progressive and resultative) and -a iss- (resultative) which attempts to identify language-general and language-specific patterns in the L2 acquisition of the Korean imperfective aspect by Japanese learners by comparing the results with previous research. Study 1 collected cross-sectional data from 55 Japanese learners of Korean as a foreign language and 18 Korean native speakers. The results show that the acquisition order was as follows: the progressive -ko iss- → the resultative -ko iss- → the resultative -a iss-. Study 2 examined the influence of instruction order by testing two groups of learners that were taught aspect markers in different orders. The results show that the order of instruction did not yield significant differences except in the rate of accuracy of the resultative marker -a iss- in the comprehension task. Keywords: Second language acquisition, Korean imperfective markers, L1 transfer, prototype, instruction order, pedagogical conditions  The work reported in this paper was supported in par by the fellowship from the Tohoku University International Advanced Research and Education Organization. Copyright 2010 by Juyeon Ryu, Kaoru Horie, and Yasuhiro Shirai 1 Introduction It has been observed that there is a strong association between the inherent aspect of verbs and the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology. The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology has shown an interesting universal pattern in both first and second language acquisition (Andersen & Shirai, 1996). This universal tendency is referred to as the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994), which claims that there is a universal developmental sequence of tense-aspect markers: past tense form starts with achievement verbs, and progressive starts with activity verbs. The Aspect Hypothesis has been verified through various cross-linguistic studies (see Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Shirai, 2009 for a review). The studies of Asian languages have not only verified the Aspect Hypothesis (e.g. Shirai & Kurono, 1998) but also extensively investigated how imperfective aspect is acquired (see Li & Shirai, 2000 for the L1 acquisition of Chinese zai and zhe; Ishida, 2004, Sugaya & Shirai, 2007 for the L2 acquisition of Japanese -te i-). As for the L2 acquisition of Japanese imperfective aspect, it has been observed that -te i- appears first with activities for the progressive use and expands to achievements for result state use, with the PACLIC 24 Proceedings 677 assumption of progressive meaning as the prototype of -te i- (Shirai & Kurono, 1998). An early study of L2 Korean (Lee & Kim, 2007) found that the progressive -ko iss- developed earlier than the resultative -ko iss- and -a iss- in L1 English …

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