The Effects of L2 Progressive Aspect Saliency on L1 Motion Event Processing: Evidence from Chinese Learners of English and German.

Abstract

Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is widely acknowledged to be bidirectional; however, empirical evidence concerning L2-to-L1 effects on cognitive processing remains limited. Drawing on the notion of progressive aspect saliency, which distinguishes languages by the degree of grammaticalization of ongoingness, the present study investigated whether the saliency of progressive aspect in a second language (L2) affects motion event processing in the first language (L1) with two psycholinguistic experiments. Experiment 1 employed a video description task to assess lexicalization preferences. Compared with Chinese monolinguals, learners of German mentioned endpoints more frequently, whereas learners of English showed an increased focus on trajectories, which indicated that the saliency of progressive aspects in L2 would influence the lexicalization of the motion events in L1. Experiment 2 used a matching decision task with and without verbal interference. In the verbal-interference condition where a digit-rehearsal task was involved, no group differences were found. However, the no-interference condition showed that group differences emerged when the digit-rehearsal task was removed: learners of English were more likely than those of German to falsely accept trajectory-matching targets, whereas learners of German were more likely than those of English to falsely accept endpoint-matching targets. The findings demonstrated that the saliency of progressive aspects in L2 would not influence the non-linguistic perceptual representations of the motion events in L1. Taken together, the acquisition of progressive aspects in L2 would influence the processing of motion events in L1 at the linguistic level rather than the cognitive level.