Ultimate attainment of tense/aspectual contrasts in L2 Spanish

This paper considers the difficulty of L1 English speakers in learning the Spanish past tense/aspectual contrasts and addresses the question of their ultimate attainment of the same. The concepts of tense/aspect are defined as well as how they fit into the larger notion of temporality. A discussion of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) and the Discourse Hypothesis (DH) which postulate that learners' acquisition of the ability to map temporality is based upon verbal aspectual classes and narrative grounding respectively are presented. Additionally, two prominent theories on the nature of aspect are also given. The ways that the past tense is encoded in English/Spanish is shown along with the inherent differences between the two and the reasons why the acquisition of the Spanish preterit/imperfect contrast is problematic for L1 English speakers. The results of a study conducted to examine this construct are presented along with an analysis of how the data contribute to our understanding of nonnative speaker ultimate attainment. The pedagogical implications of current instructional treatments of the perfective/imperfective are also addressed.Foreign Language Educatio