Yasuhiro Shirai

Case Western Reserve University | CWRU · Department of Cognitive Science

Introduction Numerous studies have been conducted regarding the second language acquisition of tense-aspect morphology. A prevailing principle in this area is the Aspect Hypothesis, which predicts that learners are influenced by lexical aspect when applying tense- aspect markers (specifically, that learners will associate perfective/past markers wi...

This article investigates how EFL learners’ progressive markings are influenced by the lexical aspect of verbs, mode of expression (spoken vs. written), and proficiency levels, focusing on the controversial issue of stative verbs in progressives in L2 acquisition. Spoken (SECCL) and written (WECCL) corpus data from two proficiency levels of Chinese...

This chapter reports on a bi-directional study that investigated the second language acquisition of telic forms in Chinese and Japanese grammar based on TUFS (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) co- referential learner corpora of Chinese and Japanese. First, the TUFS Japanese Learner Corpus of Chinese shows that Japanese learners learning Chinese...

The present study examined the use and appropriateness of the English present perfect in 24 advanced L1 Cantonese ESL learners using a rational cloze test. Results suggested that the learners strongly associated the present perfect with accomplishments than with states. Mixed-effects statistical analyses confirmed that prototypical pairings of morp...

This study investigated whether Korean children follow the acquisition pattern predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and the relationship between caretakers’ and children’s speech. Accordingly, we analyzed a Korean corpus (Ryu-Corpus) on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), which comprised longitudinal video-recorded int...

This study investigates genre and discipline effects on the frequency and contingency profiles of English Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs), with implications for English for Specific Purposes pedagogy. Specifically, 11 VACs that have featured prominently in recent analyses of general domain English usage in the British National Corpus are examine...

The current study, built on the usage-based approach to language, investigated frequency effects in Chinese learners’ acquisition of English articles. We carried out type and token frequency analysis of article usages in academic written essays sourced from a written English corpus of Chinese learners. We adopted an existing usage-based article cue...

This study investigated the effects of learners' first language (L1), lexical aspect of verbs, and proficiency levels on their use of the English progressive aspect. It analyzed spoken data from learners of three different L1s (Chinese, German, and Spanish) in an international learner corpus (LINSEI), in comparison with native speech in a comparabl...

Previous studies have shown that the grammatical aspect of verb predicates has an effect on tense-aspect sentence processing. However, it remains unclear as to whether the interaction of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect can influence the form-meaning association in the second language (L2) tense-aspect sentence processing, especially for the l...

The current study investigates the roles of lexical aspect and phonological saliency in second language acquisition of English past tense morphology. It also explores whether the effects of these factors are affected by data elicita-tion tasks and learners' L2 proficiency. We created a learner corpus consisting of data from oral personal narratives...

Although SLA research has extensively investigated the role of lexical aspect in L2 acquisition of tense-aspect marking, the role of L1 is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates the effect of cross-linguistic variation in lexical aspect and explores how the learning of lexical aspect interacts with the acquisition of aspectual morphology...

This study investigated the effects of learners’ first language (L1), lexical aspect of verbs, and proficiency levels on their use of the English progressive aspect. It analyzed spoken data from learners of three different L1s (Chinese, German, and Spanish) in an international learner corpus (LINSEI), in comparison with native speech in a comparabl...

The latest title in the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition Series presents a comprehensive review of connectionist research in second language acquisition (SLA). Second language researchers and the cognitive science community will find accessible discussions of the relevance of connectionist research to SLA. This important volume is...

The current study investigates the roles of lexical aspect and phonological saliency in second language acquisition of English past tense morphology. It also explores whether the effects of these factors are affected by data elicitation tasks and learners’ L2 proficiency. We created a learner corpus consisting of data from oral personal narratives...

This chapter investigates how polysemy can be effectively taught in the classroom by assessing the Projection Model, which predicts that the teaching of marked forms facilitates the learning of unmarked forms. Although the Projection Model has only been assessed in limited areas so far (i.e., relative clauses by Eckman, Bell and Nelson (1988); poss...

The present study investigates whether the tense-aspect development of Cantonese-English bilingual children conforms to the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai 1994. Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16(2). 133–156.), which has been shown to predict the development of monoling...

Although the Aspect Hypothesis has been tested in many European languages, it has not been investigated extensively in Chinese. The present study tested the Aspect Hypothesis in relation to two predictions: the Association Prediction, which predicts that perfective aspect (in Chinese, –le) will be associated with telic verbs and progressive aspect...

Previous studies on the L2 acquisition of -teiru in Japanese have revealed that the resultative meaning of -teiru is learned later than its progressive meaning, as predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai and Kurono, Language Learning, 48, 245–279, 1998). It has also been found that learners have problems with the resultative meaning of -teiru wh...

Although cross-linguistic research on second language tense-aspect acquisition has uncovered universal tendencies concerning the association between verbal semantics and tense-aspect markers, it is still unclear what mechanisms underlie this link. This study investigates the acquisition of two imperfective aspect markers (–ko iss– and –a iss–) in K...

Frequency effects in grammatical development: a cross-linguistic, functional approach to form–function mapping - Volume 42 Issue 2 - YASUHIRO SHIRAI

Using self-paced reading, this study investigated the role of head animacy in the processing of Japanese relative clauses (RCs). Second language (L2) learners whose first languages (L1) are English and Korean, and Japanese native speakers participated. The results showed that for native speakers, inanimate heads diminished the processing difficulty...

Although the research on the acquisition of tense-aspect markers has been extensively pursued since the 1970s, the focus of these studies has mostly been on particular grammatical markers (such as past tense markers, perfective aspect markers, progressive aspect markers), and they have tended to ignore how the total tense-aspect system, including t...

ABSTRACT This study investigates the developmental trajectory of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin-learning children's speech. We analyze the spontaneous production of RCs by four monolingual Mandarin-learning children (0;11 to 3;5) and their input from a longitudinal naturalistic speech corpus (Min, 1994). The results reveal that in terms of the...

This chapter gives an overview of methods of assessing language acquisition, both first and second. Since language acquisition, as a mental process, cannot be directly measured, researchers use various methodologies to infer acquisition. This chapter covers assessments used with natural production and elicited language samples although many languag...

This article reports on the development and use of the Developmental Sentence Scoring for Japanese (DSSJ), a new morpho-syntactical measure for Japanese constructed after the model of Lee’s English Developmental Sentence Scoring model. Using this measure, the authors calculated DSSJ scores for 84 children divided into six age groups between 2;8 and...

This article examines the mechanism of grammar acquisition in a second language and explores how linguistic categories can be acquired effectively. Currently, the mainstream second language teaching approach is the communicative approach. As far as the acquisition of linguistic categories is concerned, however, the communicative approach is based o...

Haznedar (2007) argues that longitudinal data from a child learner of English who has Turkish as a first language (L1) constitute a counterexample to the Aspect Hypothesis. In this commentary, we show that her argument is not warranted because the Aspect Hypothesis does not presuppose that tense is defective, contra her claim. However, Haznedar’s f...

The acquisition of tense-aspect markers has been an important topic in psycholinguistics, especially in relation to the roles of innate predisposition and cognitive development in language acquisition (Bickerton, 1981; Slobin, 1985). This debate has largely centred on the acquisition of European languages, such as French (Bronckart & Sinclair, 1973...

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four gra...

This article reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of...

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 c...

The Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2005) claims that pedagogic tasks should be sequenced for learners in an order of increasing cognitive complexity, and that along resource-directing dimensions of task demands increasing effort at conceptualization promotes more complex and grammaticized second language (L2) speech production. This article summari...

In SLA, it has been often assumed that the effect of the first language (L1) is not very strong in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes (e.g., Ellis, 1994; Mitchell & Myles, 2004). However, such an assumption has not been systematically examined in the literature. This article reviews the morpheme studies conducted with native speakers of Japan...

Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have...

This study analyzes the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of children's relative clauses in spontaneous speech. Longitudinal data from five Japanese children are analyzed and compared with English data (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000). The results show that the relative clauses produced...

It has been observed that there is a strong association between the inherent (lexical) aspect of verbs and the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology (the aspect hypothesis; Andersen & Shirai, 1994). To investigate why such an association is observed, this study examined the influence of inherent aspect and learners' first language (L1) on the...

Lardiere (2003), in her reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001), justifies the use of suppliance in obligatory contexts as a method of analysis in the investigation of the second language (L2) acquisition of past tense, and claims that such a method is characteristic of previous studies that have proposed the Aspect Hypothesis. It is argued here th...

The acquisition of past tense markers has often been considered to parallel conceptual development in the domain of time (e.g., Weist, 1986). However, the precise relationship between linguistic marking of time in childrenís speech and conceptual development has not been investigated in data-based research. This study analyses longitudinal speech d...

Contents: Preface. B. VanPatten, J. Williams, S. Rott, Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition. Part I: Factors and Processes. B. VanPatten, Input and Output in Establishing Form-Meaning Connections. N.C. Ellis, The Processes of Second Language Acquisition. S.M. Gass, Context and Second Language Acquisition. Y. Shirai, A Multiple-Fa...

This book is a revised and updated version of the author's 1997 Cornell University dissertation, which investigated the acquisition of Spanish past-tense morphology by classroom learners whose L1 was English. Based on three main studies, the author argues against the Aspect Hypothesis (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), the dominant view in SLA research,...

PING LI & YASUHIRO SHIRAI, Y., The acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. 261. - Volume 30 Issue 1 - RICHARD M. WEIST

This paper reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of pa...

This paper attempts to resolve the controversy concerning the conditions under which the Japanese aspectual form -teiru takes different meanings. Kindaichi (1950) and others proposed punctuality of the verb as a trigger for resultative meaning, but Okuda (1978a,b) and Kudo (1995) dismiss the argument that duration is a crucial determinant of the as...

This study reports three experiments on how children learning Mandarin Chinese comprehend and use aspect markers. These experiments examine the role of lexical aspect in children’s acquisition of grammatical aspect. Results provide converging evidence for children’s early sensitivity to (1) the association between atelic verbs and the imperfective...

This study investigates the emergence and later development of three tense-aspect markers in Japanese - -ta (past), -te i- (durative), and -ru (non-past) - in the data of three Japanese children. It was found that the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in Japanese does not necessarily follow the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Ander...

Researchers have argued that the developmental sequence of tense-aspect morphology in second language (L2) acquisition follows a universal pattern (the Aspect Hypothesis; e.g., Robison, 1995). Although such a tendency fits the acquisition of typologically similar languages (English, French and Spanish), the universal claim requires testing against...

This paper surveys the progressive and resultative morphology of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, and argues that although the distinction between perfective and imperfective is the most fundamental of aspectual distinctions, analysis of these languages reveals that this distinction can sometimes be murky. A unified account of the imperfectiv...

Kim, Marcus, Pinker, Hollander & Coppola (1994) argue that the preference children and adults show for regular inflection for verbs and nouns with novel meanings (e.g. The batter flew/flied out to centre field) should be attributed to their grammatically based sensitivity to the derivations of these verbs and nouns. However, it could also be that s...

Kim, Marcus, Pinker, Hollander & Coppola (1994) argue that the preference children and adults show for regular inflection for verbs and nouns with novel meanings (e.g. Thebatter*flew/fliedouttocentrefield) should be attributed to their grammatically based sensitivity to the derivations of these verbs and nouns. However, it could also be that speake...

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This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in three children acquiring English. It was found that (1) children start using past inflections predominantly with achievement verbs, and progressive inflections with activity verbs; and (2) the same distributional bias is found in the speech by caretakers addressed to children. The re...

Although several researchers have claimed that overgeneralization of progressive markers rarely, if ever, occurs, the validity of such claims has been questioned. In this study, the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring English, and of their mothers, was analysed for their use of verbs with respect to stativity and progressive marking. The...

This paper offers an alternative interpretation for what has been called the defective tense hypothesis, the primacy of aspect hypothesis, or simply the aspect hypothesis in the literature on first and second language acquisition of tense and aspect. The aspect hypothesis states that first and second language learners will initially be influenced b...

Although several researchers have claimed that overgeneralization of progressive markers rarely, if ever, occurs, the validity of such claims has been questioned. In this study, the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring English, and of their mothers, was analysed for their use of verbs with respect to stativity and progressive marking. The...

Discusses and explains the conditions under which first language transfer occurs in terms of the connectionist framework of second language representation, processing, and acquisition. Identifies these conditions as interlingual mapping, markedness, language distance, learner characteristics, cognitive load and sociolinguistic context. (104 referen...

While second language acquisition research has been broad in scope, the approach has been largely modular. Findings and the theories used to account for findings have addressed only small, isolated parts of the total language learning picture. We argue that it is time to begin integrating modules in our research, to develop and test integrated mode...

The relationship between prototype meanings and frequency of use is investigated with a view to establishing a foundation for the problem of "prototype acquisition." One polysemous basic verb, "put," is used in this study of native speaker discourse, and implications for both prototype theory and the acquisition of polysemy are discussed. (53 refer...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. Includes bibliographical references.