The Role of Caregivers’ Tense and Aspectual Distinctions on Children’s Later Acquisition

Grammaticalized expressions of time are found across languages. In particular, temporal information can be conveyed through tense morphology, which indicates an event’s location of time based on a referent event (Comrie, 1985) and through aspect morphology, which indicates “ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (e.g., is an event ongoing or completed; Comrie, 1976, p.3). How languages grammaticalize tense/aspect, however, can vary. For example, English marks both tense and aspect on verbs and auxiliaries, while Chinese marks only aspect, using particles (Wagner, 2012). Moreover, in languages such as English, there can be overlap between aspect/tense morphology; for example, the –ed morpheme marks past tense as in I baked a cake, and completed aspect in I had baked a cake. Children acquiring their native language, then, must learn which markers refer to which time-relevant functions. Across comprehension and production studies, it has been demonstrated that children begin to acquire the tense/aspect morphology of English by two to two-and-a-half years old (Brown, 1973; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973; Wagner, 2001; Wagner, Swensen, & Naigles, 2009). What remains unclear is how children come to learn the appropriate form to function mappings, especially given that the information conveyed by tense/aspect morphology is abstract in nature. The current study aimed to address this gap in the language acquisition literature by investigating sources of information that might facilitate children’s mapping of tense/aspect morphology to the appropriate meanings. In particular, we focused on the acquisition of tense/aspect in English. Studies on children’s acquisition of tense/aspect have largely focused on when these forms emerge. In comprehension, children demonstrate understanding of tense/aspect beginning at two years old. Using an intermodal preferential paradigm (IPL), Wagner et al. (2009) found that toddlers were able