Haznedar (2007) argues that longitudinal data from a child learner of English who has Turkish as a first language (L1) constitute a counterexample to the Aspect Hypothesis. In this commentary, we show that her argument is not warranted because the Aspect Hypothesis does not presuppose that tense is defective, contra her claim. However, Haznedar's…

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four…

The Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2005) claims that pedagogic tasks should be sequenced for learners in an order of increasing cognitive complexity, and that along resource-directing dimensions of task demands increasing effort at conceptualization promotes more complex and grammaticized second language (L2) speech production. This article…

Lardiere (2003), in her reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001), justifies the use of suppliance in obligatory contexts as a method of analysis in the investigation of the second language (L2) acquisition of past tense, and claims that such a method is characteristic of previous studies that have proposed the Aspect Hypothesis. It is argued here…

It has been observed that there is a strong association between the inherent (lexical) aspect of verbs and the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology (the aspect hypothesis; Andersen & Shirai, 1994). To investigate why such an association is observed, this study examined the influence of inherent aspect and learners' first language (L1) on the…