CNL Lunch

Nina Kazanina

Eventhood and Comprehension of Aspect
in Russian Children

Thursday September 12th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

We present results from a set of experiments that investigate comprehension of aspect in Russian children. Previous results from spontaneous speech and sentence-to-picture matching tasks suggest early mastery of both perfective and imperfective aspectual forms by Russian-speaking children. However, our results suggest that Russian 3-5 year olds show a strikingly non-adultlike understanding of aspect when tested on their ability to associate imperfective predicates with incomplete events.
Unlike previous studies that explored completed vs. ongoing events, ours investigated whether children can reliably use aspect to distinguish completed past events from past events that do not reach completion. Experiment1 used tested verbs of creation. Experiment 2 used change-of-state predicates (e.g., fill a glass). Adult controls and half of the children performed at ceiling levels throughout. In both experiments, however, the remaining half of the children (mostly younger children) showed adult-like comprehension of perfective questions, but non-adultlike comprehension of imperfectives, by failing to choose an incomplete event in almost all trials.