The Acquisition of the English Present Perfect by Arabic Speakers of English: Experimental Studies.

Abstract

The data from prior research has provided evidence for the L1 Arabic influence in the acquisition of L2 English present perfect. However, little is known about what is exactly being transferred from L1 Arabic grammar to facilitate or hinder the acquisition of the English present perfect contexts by Arabic speakers of English. This thesis presents two novel empirical studies into the acquisition of the L2 English present perfect by native speakers of Arabic, across a broad range of proficiency in English. The first set of studies develop a bottom-up approach to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2012) to empirically determine how the present perfect feature mapping in English compares to feature mapping in Arabic, which leads to precise L1 Arabic transfer predictions for the FRH, which we then tested the in an L2 acquisition study. The results revealed that advanced L2 users (L2ers) reassembled the present perfect vs past features and assigned each feature to the corresponding morphological marker in English. The present was transferred beyond the [+continuative] and [+telic] context by L2ers of low proficiency levels. The L2ers of low proficiency level show low sensitivity to the feature of temporal boundedness compared to highly proficient L2ers. This inductive approach has showed new insights for the feature reassembly between L1 and L2 in the acquisition of the English present perfect that other approaches did not, where L2ers made form-meaning associations based on the properties of the lexical aspect (telicity) and the semantic interpretations of the English present perfect contexts. This approach also allows for defining the target as a range, which takes into account the variability in the native speakers’ performance.