The Acquisition of the English Present Perfect by Arabic Speakers of English: Experimental Studies.

The data from prior research has provided evidence for the L1 Arabic influence in the acquisition of L2 English present perfect. However, little is known about what is exactly being transferred from L1 Arabic grammar to facilitate or hinder the acquisition of the English present perfect contexts by Arabic speakers of English. This thesis presents two novel empirical studies into the acquisition of the L2 English present perfect by native speakers of Arabic, across a broad range of proficiency in English. The first set of studies develop a bottom-up approach to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2012) to empirically determine how the present perfect feature mapping in English compares to feature mapping in Arabic, which leads to precise L1 Arabic transfer predictions for the FRH, which we then tested the in an L2 acquisition study. The results revealed that advanced L2 users (L2ers) reassembled the present perfect vs past features and assigned each feature to the corresponding morphological marker in English. The present was transferred beyond the [+continuative] and [+telic] context by L2ers of low proficiency levels. The L2ers of low proficiency level show low sensitivity to the feature of temporal boundedness compared to highly proficient L2ers. This inductive approach has showed new insights for the feature reassembly between L1 and L2 in the acquisition of the English present perfect that other approaches did not, where L2ers made form-meaning associations based on the properties of the lexical aspect (telicity) and the semantic interpretations of the English present perfect contexts. This approach also allows for defining the target as a range, which takes into account the variability in the native speakers’ performance.

In the final part of the thesis, in an inference task, we investigate how L2ers interpret the English present perfect contexts: which type of current relevance interpretation (continuative vs. recent past) do they infer, and how this interpretation interacts with the telicity of the predicate, comparing with the English native speakers. The results revealed that the effect of telicity on the participants’ acceptance rates of the inferences differs based on nativeness (native speakers vs non-native speakers) and proficiency. Telicity of the predicate influences the acceptance rates of English native speakers in the interpretation of the recent past, where there is a high probability of accepting recent past inferences when telic predicates are present. On the other hand, the influence of telicity was manifested more in the continuative interpretation by L2 speakers, where the likelihood of accepting the continuative interpretation with telic predicates significantly decreased as the L2 English proficiency level increased. For lower proficiency groups of L2ers, the telicity did not show any effect in their acceptance rates of the (continuative vs recent past) interpretations in the inference task. The results of this study indicate that the effect of telicity could extend to high-proficient L2ers.