Aspectual tenses in native Spanish-speaking adults

Fourteen native Spanish-speaking adults participated in a study on tense and aspect in Spanish. Subjects viewed videos that depicted completed events or videos that ended with an ongoing event and chose a sentence in the past tense that best described the event. One condition included adverbial cues and the other condition did not. Subjects also read paragraphs describing bounded and unbounded events and chose a past tense verb that best fit the context. It was found that subjects consistently chose preterit responses for completed event videos in both the adverb and non-adverb condition, but responses varied more in the videos that ended with ongoing events. The majority of subjects selected preterit verbs for bounded events and imperfect verbs for unbounded events. Implications and further directions of research are discussed.