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

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 issin the comprehension task.