Abstract:
This study looks at second language (L2) acquisition of aspect in Russian by
adult first language (L1) speakers to examine whether L1Turkish/L2 Russian
speakers are as sensitive as native Russian speakers to the morphosyntax of Russian
aspect involving perfective and imperfective form with its telicity-assigning
mechanisms in Russian. We tested 16 L1Turkish/L2 Russian speakers and 16 L1
Russian native speakers on an online Semantic Entailment (SE) task with telicity and
boundedness semantic features and a Truth-Value Judgment (TVJ) task involving
sentences with perfective and imperfective forms including quantity and non quantity internal argument themes. The results of independent samples t-test
conducted with the data from the SET indicated significant differences between two
groups. L2 speakers are less successful than L1 Russian, in particular in the
comprehension of sentences with perfective aspect. The results of the Truth Value
Judgment (TVJ) test also confirmed these results.
