The acquisition of tense and aspect has received considerable attention in the SLA literature; this work is distinctive in that it focuses on the acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages by native English speakers. It is a collection of seven chapters that include four empirical studies and one chapter that links empirical findings to practical pedagogical applications, with the first and last chapters of the book providing a unifying framework for the rest. The volume editors open chapter 1 with an overview of tense and aspect in English and Romance as well as a review of the concept of aspect. The rest of the chapter outlines six hypotheses on the acquisition of aspect, classified according to emphasis on pragmatic, semantic, textual, input, cognitive, or syntactic factors. The chapter closes with a discussion of the challenges faced by researchers trying to develop a comprehensive model of second language (L2) tense and aspect acquisition.
Comajoan's chapter 2 presents a longitudinal study that examines, from a discourse analysis perspective, the acquisition of perfective and imperfective morphology in Catalan. The findings of this study lead the author to argue for the important role of discourse in the acquisition of past tense morphology. In chapter 3, Ayoun investigates the acquisition of aspect in French from a minimalist perspective. Learners were found to be successful in acquiring the appropriate feature strength of the hypothesized functional category aspect phrase along with its semantic properties, although the learners' tense and aspect systems were not yet targetlike.
In chapter 4, Rocca describes a longitudinal study of children learning Italian as a L2. Data collected over a period of 6 months generally support the effects of lexical aspect on the acquisition of the passato prossimo and the imperfetto, although factors such as task type and individual variation also seemed to play a role. In chapter 5, Salaberry investigates the acquisition of aspect in third language (L3) Portuguese by participants with previous knowledge of Spanish as a L2. In addition to possible transfer of knowledge of aspect from L2 to L3, results revealed learner difficulties in marking aspect with stative verbs. Salaberry argues for a dissociation between a rule-based marking of eventive verbs and an association-based marking of stative verbs to account for these difficulties.
Blyth's chapter 6 focuses on the practical implications of research on tense and aspect in Romance, suggesting specific pedagogical approaches to the teaching of aspectual distinctions. After addressing the reasons why learners experience difficulties in the acquisition of aspect, Blyth presents principles that teachers should take into account when designing lessons and activities and also discusses research on instructional techniques for teaching aspectual forms.
In the last chapter of the book, Ayoun and Salaberry summarize and critically review the studies presented in chapters 2–5. They then propose a model that pulls together the various theoretical approaches outlined in chapter 1 to comprehensively describe the acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages. Ayoun and Salaberry conclude by discussing the beneficial effects of level-appropriate instruction on the development of tense and aspect.
This work will be of interest to researchers who investigate the acquisition of tense and aspect in any L2, even though the focus of the empirical studies is on Romance. Language teachers will also benefit from the discussion of research-based implications for the teaching of aspectual distinctions (chapters 6 and 7). Overall, the book is well edited, although a good number of typos appear to have escaped notice. Additionally, chapter 3 contains some confusing figures that are rather difficult to interpret (Figures 5 and 6), and chapter 5 refers to appendixes that do not exist. The four empirical studies are well designed on the whole. However, three of them examine participant groups of native English speakers that have previously learned (chapters 2 and 5) or are concurrently learning (chapter 4) a Romance language other than the one that serves as the focus of the study. Only Salaberry's chapter takes this seemingly important factor into account in the study design, although Comajoan mentions the issue in a footnote and briefly in his discussion of the results. Aside from these minor issues, the book does an excellent job of presenting various theoretical perspectives on the acquisition of tense and aspect and of unifying these perspectives to propose a comprehensive model of the development of tense and aspect in Romance languages.
