Research on the acquisition of tense and aspect has become a major topic of research in SLA. Earlier studies focusing on the acquisition of morphology evolved toward studies that tried to find evidence for the role of lexical aspectual categories and discourse organization. When things seemed to be settled, a new strand of studies has appeared that explores further issues in the acquisition of tense and aspect. This book is part of this latest group of studies. It investigates the SLA of tense and aspect but adds enough new features so that it addresses old arguments (e.g., is there more influence of lexical aspect or discourse grounding?) as well as current and possibly future ones (e.g., what is the role of frequency in the acquisition of tense and aspect?).

This volume is a revised version of Rosi’s dissertation and presents a study on the acquisition of second language (L2) Italian by university students in Italy (12 native German speakers, 12 native Spanish speakers, and 24 adult native speakers of Italian). Learners were at the low-intermediate level and were asked to watch three excerpts of the movie Modern Times and retell them at three different testing sessions (one at a time) at 2-month intervals. One of the positive aspects of the study is that it provides a detailed description of the data corpus and how it was annotated. The author discusses in depth how lexical aspect, grounding, aspect, appropriateness of use, and other relevant variables were coded (up to 16, including syntax, definiteness, and subordination, among others). The results of the study are presented in detail, and they show that as past perfective and imperfective L2 Italian forms emerge, they do so following the predictions of both the aspect hypothesis and the discourse hypothesis (Bardovi-Harlig, Reference Bardovi-Harlig2000)—that is, there is an association of perfectivity with telicity and foreground, and one of imperfectivity with atelicity and background. However, the association is not the same for lexical aspect and grounding in the whole process of language acquisition: In the early stage, learners tend to associate aspect with specific aspectual categories, and only later do they associate them with the foreground and background of narratives. This is an important finding because very few studies in previous research have examined the same data under the perspective of lexical aspect and discourse grounding. Additionally, the study argues for the role of the first language (L1) in the SLA of verbal past morphology. In the case of the current study, it was found that L1 Spanish learners had an initial advantage due to the similarity of the Spanish and the Italian systems (compared to the German one). The main difference was that whereas Spanish speakers used imperfective from the beginning, German speakers overextended the use of perfective forms in imperfective contexts in the early stages.

The last section of the book takes a different turn and provides an introduction to neural networks and the simulation of the L1 and L2 acquisition of tense and aspect in a specific type of network (self-organizing maps [SOM]). The author applies an emergentist analysis to Italian, Spanish, German, and learner Italian (as produced by native speakers of German and Spanish) data. The results showed that the self-organizing maps trained on Spanish and Italian data were similar: Perfective forms were associated with a variety of grounding and actionality values, whereas imperfective was more closely associated with background and states and activities. In contrast, the German learner data showed that the main criterion of association was grounding and not as much lexical aspect. Thus, the results from the simulation confirm those of the learner study.

In sum, this volume has three major strengths. First, it takes into account previous research in the acquisition of tense and aspect and pushes it forward by examining the interrelationship of a number of variables. Second, it combines different research methodologies (quantitative and qualitative) and frameworks (analysis of learner data and computer simulations). Third, it provides a good discussion of issues related to coding L2 data in tense and aspect studies. A minor weakness is that, as is the case for most dissertations turned to books, some chapters are too long and detailed (e.g., the results chapter) or unbalanced (e.g., the discussion chapter) and that some figures are difficult to read. In sum, the book will be of great interest to specialists in the SLA of tense and aspect as well as to those wishing to have an overview of the major issues under discussion in the SLA of verbal forms and usage.