TIME, PERSPECTIVES, VERBS, AND IMAGINING EVENTS

Memory & Cognition, 2003

We investigated the relative contribution of perfective and imperfective aspectual cues on situation models. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to choose pictures showing completed events than pictures showing ongoing events when they had read perfective sentences, but chose either picture after reading imperfective sentences. In Experiment 2, only one picture was presented and participants were faster to respond to completed pictures than to ongoing pictures when they had read perfective sentences, but showed no latency differences after reading the imperfective sentences. In Experiment 3, participants were faster to read perfective sentences after having seen completed pictures rather than intermediate pictures, but there was no difference for imperfective sentences. The consistent pattern of results demonstrates that readers construct mental representations of completed events when the perfective aspect is used to describe an event. The lack of effect on imperfective sentences and pictures suggests that each reader represents an in-progress event at varying stages of completion.

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2006

Aspect contributes important temporal information for the construction of situation models in the human mind. Previous studies examining the effect of grammatical aspect on accomplishment verbs (e.g. bake a cake) show that perfective sentences/utterances are processed faster than imperfective ones Yap et al., 2004, in press). The present study, however, shows strong interaction between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. More specifically, the results show that perfective facilitation is found on accomplishment verbs, while imperfective facilitation is found on activity verbs. We suggest that this is because the inherent atelic nature of activity verbs matches the unbounded features associated with imperfectives.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2007

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as completions to sentence fragments with imperfective than those with perfect aspect. Third, the amplitude of the N400 component to location nouns varies as a function of aspect and typicality, being smallest for imperfective sentences with highly expected locations and largest for imperfective sentences with less expected locations. Fourth, the amplitude of a sustained frontal negativity spanning prepositional phrases is larger following perfect than following imperfective aspect. Taken together, these findings suggest a dynamic interplay between event knowledge and the linguistic stream.

PLOS ONE

Two experiments examine how grammatical verb aspect constrains our understanding of events. According to linguistic theory, an event described in the perfect aspect (John had opened the bottle) should evoke a mental representation of a finished event with focus on the resulting object, whereas an event described in the imperfective aspect (John was opening the bottle) should evoke a representation of the event as ongoing, including all stages of the event, and focusing all entities relevant to the ongoing action (instruments, objects, agents, locations, etc.). To test this idea, participants saw rebus sentences in the perfect and imperfective aspect, presented one word at a time, self-paced. In each sentence, the instrument and the recipient of the action were replaced by pictures (John was using/had used a *corkscrew* to open the *bottle* at the restaurant). Time to process the two images as well as speed and accuracy on sensibility judgments were measured. Although experimental sentences always made sense, half of the object and instrument pictures did not match the temporal constraints of the verb. For instance, in perfect sentences aspect-congruent trials presented an image of the corkscrew closed (no longer in-use) and the wine bottle fully open. The aspect-incongruent yet still sensible versions either replaced the corkscrew with an in-use corkscrew (open, in-hand) or the bottle image with a half-opened bottle. In this case, the participant would still respond "yes", but with longer expected response times. A three-way interaction among Verb Aspect, Sentence Role, and Temporal Match on image processing times showed that participants were faster to process images that matched rather than mismatched the aspect of the verb, especially for resulting objects in perfect sentences. A second experiment replicated and extended the results to confirm that this was not due to the placement of the object in the sentence. These two experiments extend previous research, showing how verb aspect drives not only the temporal structure of event representation, but also the focus on specific roles of the event. More generally, the findings of visual match during online sentence-picture processing are consistent with theories of perceptual simulation.

Linguistics, 50(4), 2012

The role of grammatical systems in profiling particular conceptual categories is used as a key in exploring questions concerning language specificity during the conceptualization phase in language production. This study focuses on the extent to which crosslinguistic differences in the concepts profiled by grammatical means in the domain of temporality (grammatical aspect) affect event conceptualization and distribution of attention when talking about motion events. The analyses, which cover native speakers of Standard Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, German, Russian and Spanish, not only involve linguistic evidence, but also data from an eye tracking experiment and a memory test. The findings show that direction of attention to particular parts of motion events varies to some extent with the existence of grammaticized means to express imperfective/progressive aspect. Speakers of languages that do not have grammaticized aspect of this type are more likely to take a holistic view when talking about motion events and attend to as well as refer to endpoints of motion events, in contrast to speakers of aspect languages.

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Semantic theories predict that the dimension for comparison given a sentence like A gleebed more than B depends on what the verb gleeb means: if gleeb expresses a property of events, the evaluation should proceed by number; if it expresses a property of processes, any of distance, duration, or number should be available. An adequate test of theories like this requires first determining, independently of language, the conditions under which people will understand a novel verb to be true of a series of events or a single ongoing process. We investigate this prior question by studying people's representation of two cues in simple visual scenes: a) whether some happening is interrupted by temporal pauses, and b) whether and how the speed of an object's motion changes. We measured representation by probing people's choice of verb in free-form descriptions of the scenes, and how they segment the scenes for the purposes of counting. We find evidence that both types of cues shape people's representation of simple motions as events or processes, but in different ways.

The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique, 2012

Event Representation in Language and Cognition examines new research into how the mind deals with the experience of events. Empirical research into the cognitive processes involved when people view events and talk about them is still a young field. The chapters by leading experts draw on data from the description of events in spoken and signed languages, first and second language acquisition, co-speech gesture and eye movements during language production, and from non-linguistic categorization and other tasks. The book highlights newly found evidence for how perception, thought, and language constrain each other in the experience of events. It will be of particular interest to linguists, psychologists, and philosophers, as well as to anyone interested in the representation and processing of events.

Grammatical aspect is known to shape event understanding. However, little is known about how it interacts with other important temporal information, such as recent and distant past. The current work uses computer-mouse tracking (Spivey et al.,2005) to explore the interaction of aspect and temporal context. Participants in our experiment listened to past motion event descriptions that varied according to aspect (simple past,past progressive) and temporal distance (recent past,distant past) while viewing scenes with paths and implied destinations. Participants used a computer mouse to place characters into the scene to match event descriptions. Our results indicated that aspect and temporal context interact in interesting ways. When aspect placed emphasis on the ongoing details of the event and the temporal context was recent( thus, making fine details available in memory), this match between conditions elicited smoother and faster computer mouse movements than when conditions mismatched. Likewise, when aspect placed emphasis on the less detailed end state of the event and temporal context was in the distant past (thus,making fine details less available), this match between conditions also elicited smoother and faster computer mouse movements.

Psychological bulletin, 2001

Events can be understood in terms of their temporal structure. Here, we draw on several bodies of research to construct an analysis of how people use event structure in perception, understanding, planning, and action. Philosophy provides a grounding for the basic units of events and actions. Perceptual psychology provides an analogy to object perception: Like objects, events belong to categories and, like objects, events have parts. These relationships generate two hierarchical organizations for events: taxonomies and partonomies. Event partonomies have been studied by looking at how people segment activity as it happens. Structured representations of events can relate partonomy to goal relationships and causal structure; such representations have been shown to drive narrative comprehension, memory and planning. Computational models provide insight into how mental representations might be organized and transformed. These different approaches to event structure converge on an explanation of how multiple sources of information interact in event perception and conception.

Memory & Cognition, 2000

Narrative descriptions of events often depart from how these events would have occurred in "real time." For example, narratives often contain time shifts in which events that are irrelevant to the plot are omitted. has shown that these time shifts may affect on-line comprehension. Specifically, they are associated with increases in processing load and a deactivation of previous information. The experiments in the present article show that the situation is more complex. Specifically, there is only a deactivation of previous events if they are not assumed to be ongoing after a time shift. Furthermore, explicit discontinuations of events, as in he stopped walking also lead to deactivations when compared with explicit continuations and resumptions.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: …, 2001

How do people perceive routine events such as making a bed as they unfold in time? Research on knowledge structures suggests that people conceive of events as goal-directed partonomic hierarchies. Here, participants segmented videos of events into coarse and fine units on separate viewings; some described the activity of each unit as well. Both segmentation and descriptions support the hierarchical bias hypothesis in event perception: observers spontaneously encoded the events in terms of partonomic hierarchies. Hierarchical organization was strengthened by simultaneous description, and to a weaker extent, by familiarity. Describing from memory rather than perception yielded fewer units but did not alter the qualitative nature of the descriptions. Although the descriptions were telegraphic and without communicative intent, their hierarchical structure was evident to naive readers. The data suggest that cognitive schemata mediate between perceptual and functional information about events, and indicate that these knowledge structures may be organized around object/action units.

How do people perceive routine events such as making a bed as they unfold in time? Research on knowledge structures suggests that people conceive of events as goal-directed partonomic hierarchies. Here, participants segmented videos of events into coarse and fine units on separate viewings; some described the activity of each unit as well. Both segmentation and descriptions support the hierarchical bias hypothesis in event perception: observers spontaneously encoded the events in terms of partonomic hierarchies. Hierarchical organization was strengthened by simultaneous description, and to a weaker extent, by familiarity. Describing from memory rather than perception yielded fewer units but did not alter the qualitative nature of the descriptions. Although the descriptions were telegraphic and without communicative intent, their hierarchical structure was evident to naive readers. The data suggest that cognitive schemata mediate between perceptual and functional information about events, and indicate that these knowledge structures may be organized around object/action units.

Memory & …, 2004

Connectedness: papers by and for Sarah VanWagenen, UCLAWPL 18., 2014

What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both these questions. In the first experiment, a processing correlate of telicity is identified by manipulating verbal telicity (inherently telic vs. unspecified verbs) and direct object quantization, finding a principled delay in the use of these verbs’ aspectual representation in which both the verb and its internal argument are required before the comprehension system can commit to a telic or atelic interpretation. In the second experiment, this processing correlate reveals no differences in processing between inherently atelic and unspecified verbs, delayed or otherwise. We argue that together these experiments support theories that distinguish between two verb classifications, a class of inherently telic verbs and a class of unspecified verbs, but not those that include a class of inherently atelic verbs.

Linguistics in The Netherlands, 2000