ABSTRACT
The acquisition of past tense morphology has been extensively investigated in language acquisition research. This chapter reviews the famous past tense debate (or the regular–irregular debate) as it relates to SLA. This chapter also reviews the extensive research on the Aspect Hypothesis, which targets the semantic bias in past tense marking. L1 and L2 learners have been found to use past tense marking first on telic verbs, and later on atelic classes of verbs. Emphasis is placed on past tense marking but also on aspectual marking.
