L3 acquisition of English Present Perfect.

Abstract

This study investigates L3 acquisition of English present perfect by Greek Cypriot speakers. One hundred CG university students took part in the study, the first part of which examined the sensitivity to grammatical norms (a passage correction task, based on Odlin et al., 2006), and the other part was focused on the production of English present perfect (elicitation of natural discourse, essays about personal experience). The results showed that L3 learners used more non-target tense forms (present simple and past simple) than the target present perfect in obligatory contexts, which is due to transfer from L1 CG. The findings are in line with the Typological Primacy Model (Rothman, 2010), as L3 learners transfer from L1 and this transfer is negative.