The acquisition of tense-aspect has been extensively investigated in the L2 research field. A consistent finding across these previous studies is that L2 learners often exhibit variability and experience fossilization in their usage of L2 tense-aspect. Despite this issue being widely explored, previous research has predominantly relied on learners' production and metalinguistic judgement data. While there has also been a growing number of processing studies in L2 tense-aspect research, the quantity of such studies still remains small. In addition, mixed evidence has emerged regarding the role of L1 in the processing and acquisition.
Aiming to address this potential gap, the present study investigates the online processing (eye-tracking and sentence-matching task), production (elicited imitation task), and explicit knowledge (comprehension: judgements task; production: gap-filling task) of tense-aspect structures among L2 English learners, focusing on 24 Chinese and 24 Arabic learners. It employs an experimental design with five different tasks crossing both comprehension/production and online/offline domains. The results suggest that both L2 groups could achieve native-like performance for present progressive items, which can be attributed to a positive L1 transfer effect. In contrast, the L1 Chinese group consistently underperformed compared to their L1 Arabic counterparts for past simple items, and both L2 groups exhibited non-native-like performance for present perfect items, attributable to negative L1 influences.
Overall, the results indicate a strong influence of the L1 on learners’ performance in both comprehension and production; however, such influence is particularly evident in the online tasks. It is argued that L1 transfer is more likely to impact implicit knowledge than explicit knowledge. For future research that examines L2 acquisition, integrating both online and offline tasks within a single study design is necessary to better assess learners’ acquisition.
