Acquisition of Aspectual Meanings in a Language with and a Language without Morphological Aspect

This comprehension study on aspectual form-to-meaning correspondences set out to see if the presence of aspect as morphological category in a language makes the acquisition of aspectual form-meaning pairs relatively easy in comparison to a language that lacks such an aspect category. In Polish, aspect is a grammatical category—all verbs are marked as perfective or imperfective—and tense is marked separately. In Dutch on the other hand, different past tenses carry various aspectual meanings, and so tense and aspect are conflated. The results of the study show no developmental advantage of having aspect as a grammatical category, that is, Polish children do not acquire the meanings of perfective and imperfective aspect at an earlier age than Dutch children acquire the aspectual meanings of their past tenses. On the contrary, the same developmental path shows up in both languages equally: the target meaning of Polish Perfective aspect and Dutch Present Perfect are acquired before that of Polish Imperfective aspect and Dutch Periphrastic Past Progressive (so-called aan-het construction). Specifically, the 2 and 3-year-old children in this study have acquired the completion 1