A bottom-up approach to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis: Acquisition of the present perfect by Arabic learners of English

Abstract

Data from prior research has provided evidence for L1 Arabic influence on the acquisition of L2 English present perfect (PP). However, little is known about what exactly is being transferred from L1 Arabic grammar to facilitate or hinder the acquisition of the English PP by Arabic speakers of English. This paper adopts a bottom-up approach to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2012) to empirically compare PP feature mapping in English and Arabic, resulting in precise L1 Arabic transfer predictions for feature reassembly, which we then tested in an L2 acquisition study. The results revealed that Arabic L2 users of English (L2ers) made form-meaning associations based on the lexical aspect (telicity) and semantic interpretations of English PP contexts, which revealed new insights into L1-L2 feature reassembly in English PP acquisition that other approaches did not.