Revisiting the connection between progressive aspect and motion event cognition: Evidence from L1 Mandarin Chinese and L2 Swedish

Abstract

This study investigates whether grammatical aspect influences the extent to which speakers attend to the endpoint (Goal) of motion events. Taking a typological perspective, the study examines the use of progressive markers in Mandarin Chinese through a progressive questionnaire. After identifying Mandarin’s aspectual features, the study re-examines the relationship between progressive aspect and endpoint preferences by analyzing motion event descriptions made by native Mandarin speakers and comparing their performance with L1 Mandarin learners of L2 Swedish in a memory-based triad-matching task. The results of these comparisons reveal that Mandarin speakers mentioned the endpoint of an event as frequently as [+aspect] English speakers but significantly less frequently than [-aspect] Swedish and Afrikaans speakers, thereby indicating an ‘endpoint preference’ for Swedish and Afrikaans speakers. In a non-linguistic similarity judgment task, no significant differences were observed between the L1 and L2 groups in their frequency of pairing the target clip with the endpoint-highlighted alternative clip. However, a positive correlation between the participants’ length of stay in Sweden and endpoint preferences was identified, implying a cognitive shift from ‘progress salience’ in [+aspect] L1 to ‘endpoint salience’ in [-aspect] L2. This suggests that immersion in an L2 context influences language acquisition and cognitive restructuring.