Comprehension and production of grammatical aspect in child Spanish : Semantics vs. pragmatics

According to the Imperfective Paradox, perfective (PF) and imperfective (IPF) aspect morphemes with telic predicates differ in that PF entails completion while IPF does not (Kazanina & Phillips, 2007). Therefore, telic PF predicates can be related only to complete versions of events, while IPF telic predicates can refer to complete and incomplete events. However, when these forms are used to convey new information, IPF can be pragmatically enriched generating the Scalar Implicature that completion has not been reached. Studies on language acquisition have shown that grammatical aspect morphemes are used productively from really early on and, according to some studies, they are understood adult-like for children as old as three (Weist et al., 1984, 1991; Vinnitskaya & Wexler, 2001). However, some other studies have also documented that children, unlike adults, tend to relate IPF telic predicates to complete events (van Hout, 2005, 2007; Kazanina & Phillips, 2007). Additionally, elicited production studies report that five year-old children, unlike adults, tend to produce IPFs to describe complete versions of events corresponding to telic predicates (Vinnitskaya & Wexler, 2001; Hogdson, 2003). We hypothesize that divergences of children and adults’ results in the different tasks could be due to the fact that the tasks used for testing aspect involve different kinds of reasoning: truth-value judgment tasks induce logic reasoning while picture-selection tasks and elicited production tasks involve pragmatic reasoning. In this study two experiments testing 5 year-old’s comprehension and production of grammatical aspect morphemes in Spanish will be presented: a truth-value judgment task and an elicited production task. The aim of the study is to test if there are differences between adults and children among the different tasks. The article is structured as follows. Section 2 is devoted to explain the basic concepts of lexical and grammatical aspect and their semantic meaning and pragmatic uses. Section 3 includes an overview of the most relevant findings on the acquisition of grammatical aspect. The experiments presented in Section 4 are followed by the results in Section 5 and their discussion in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 summarizes the main conclusions of the study.