Acquisition of grammatical aspect morphology in Portuguese by bilingual speakers of Chinese and Portuguese: comprehension data

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how Chinese-Portuguese bilingual children understand the progressive (imperfective) and the simple past (perfective) in different contexts in Portuguese. We also want to understand whether extralinguistic factors, such as linguistic experience and the age at which children are regularly exposed to Portuguese, influence the acquisition and comprehension of aspectual morphology. We designed a picture selection task for 43 bilingual speakers of Chinese and Portuguese and 43 native speakers of Portuguese between the ages of 6 and 12. From the results obtained, we observed that these speakers acquire the aspectual properties in a certain sequence, starting by associating the perfective with telic predicates (accomplishments and achievements) and the progressive with durative predicates (activities and accomplishments), with the main difficulties in the achievement items in the progressive, as predicted by Aspect Primacy Hypothesis. Although extralinguistic factors show a correlation with the speakers' level of education, they don't seem to significantly influence the comprehension of these aspectual properties.