Recent research on the acquisition of aspect: An embarrassment of riches?

Roumyana Slabakova University of Iowa This review article surveys recent research on the first and second language acquisition of temporal and aspectual properties of natural languages. Three recently published books are discussed in the context of the Aspect Hypothesis and the prototype, the connectionist, and the discourse explanations for the attested acquisition sequences. A potentially misleading terminological issue is highlighted: Deictic tense, grammatical, and lexical aspect are often conflated in acquisition studies. Recent research from the (innatist) generative perspective (e.g., Olsen & Weinberg, 1999) is also examined. An alternative explanation of the skewed acquisition sequences in terms of processing costs is proposed. Some important topics for future aspect research are identified.