ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Processing of Aspect in L2 English: Slavic, but not Norwegian L1 speakers associate Past Simple with Completion
1. Central European University, Wien, Austria
2. UiT Norges arktiske universitet, Tromsø, Norway
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Abstract
This study investigated the role of L1 influence on how L2 speakers interpret aspectual semantics of English past simple accomplishments. English past simple is aspectually underspecified and is thus vulnerable to the transfer of L1 aspectual representations. Slavic languages (Russian, Polish) grammaticalize dual perfective-imperfective aspect. Norwegian does not grammaticalize aspect. L1 Polish (n=57), Russian (n=20), and Norwegian (n=50) speakers participated in two web-based Visual World Paradigm eyetracking experiments. Offline judgments and online gaze preferences from both experiments showed that L1 Slavic speakers associated English past simple with completed event pictures. This categorical association strengthened in offline judgments with higher L2 proficiency. L1 Norwegian speakers associated English past simple with ongoing events both online and offline. This association weakened in offline judgments with higher L2 proficiency. These findings provide evidence of L1 transfer during L2 aspectual interpretation and elucidate the interaction between crosslinguistic influence and L2 proficiency. Implications for theoretical models of cross-linguistic influence are discussed.
Summary
Keywords
bilingualism, Crosslinguistic influence, Event representations, eyetracking, Grammatical Aspect
Received
28 November 2025
Accepted
18 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Kamenetski, Mitrofanova and Minor. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Anna Kamenetski
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