This research addresses implicit learning of temporal meanings in English by adult non-native readers of German, a language without morphosyntactic imperfective aspect. Twenty-four learners from mixed first languages participated in a norming study assessing unenhanced aspect awareness. Then, in a second experiment, 91 native-German learners…

Multiclause sentences with the temporal adverbs "while" or "when" referring to simultaneous events (e.g., "While [when] John was writing a letter, Mary comes into the room") were compared in German and Spanish. Following Talmy (2001), we assumed that the event in the main clause is the figure (F; the event to be located in time), and the event in…