The defective tense hypothesis: on the emergence of tense and aspect in child Polish

Abstract

Longitudinal and cross-sectional designs were combined in this analysis of the evolution of children's capacity to represent deictic relationships. The longitudinal component contained the naturalistic observation of three relatively young children (1; 7–1; 9) and three somewhat older children (2; 0–2; 2). These children were tape-recorded in caretaker–child interactions. The analysis of the corpora from these children revealed: (1) imperfective activity verb phrases in the past tense, (2) telic verb phrases in the past tense used independently of resulting states, (3) moderately remote past references, and (4) deictic future references. The cross-sectional component contained an experiment in which elicitation procedures were used to obtain past and future references to atelic and telic situations. Nine 2½- and nine 3½-year-old children were tested. Generally high levels of performance reinforced the outcome of the longitudinal analysis.