Grammatical and lexical aspect constrains the availability of events in situation models.

Becker R, Ferretti TR, Madden-Lombardi C. Grammatical and lexical aspect constrains the availability of events in situation models. Cognition. 2013;129(2):212-220.The present study investigates how readers' representations of narratives are constrained by three sources of temporal information; grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and the duration of intervening events. Participants read short stories in which a target event with an intrinsic endpoint or not (lexical aspect: accomplishments/activities) was described as ongoing or completed (grammatical aspect: imperfective/perfective). An intervening sentence described either a long or short duration event before the target situation was reintroduced later in the story. The electroencephalogram time-locked to the reintroduction of the target event elicited a larger N400 for perfective versus imperfective accomplishments, and this effect occurred only after short intervening events. Alternatively, the N400 to targets in the activity condition did not vary as a function of grammatical aspect or duration of intervening events. These results provide novel insight into how the temporal properties of events interact to constrain the availability of concepts in situation models

Grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and event duration constrain the availability of events in narratives

Becker R, Ferretti TR, Madden-Lombardi C. Grammatical and lexical aspect constrains the availability of events in situation models. Cognition. 2013;129(2):212-220.The present study investigates how readers' representations of narratives are constrained by three sources of temporal information; grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and the duration of intervening events. Participants read short stories in which a target event with an intrinsic endpoint or not (lexical aspect: accomplishments/activities) was described as ongoing or completed (grammatical aspect: imperfective/perfective). An intervening sentence described either a long or short duration event before the target situation was reintroduced later in the story. The electroencephalogram time-locked to the reintroduction of the target event elicited a larger N400 for perfective versus imperfective accomplishments, and this effect occurred only after short intervening events. Alternatively, the N400 to targets in the activity condition did not vary as a function of grammatical aspect or duration of intervening events. These results provide novel insight into how the temporal properties of events interact to constrain the availability of concepts in situation models

Grammatical verb aspect and event roles in sentence processing

<div><p>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 *<u>corkscrew</u>* to open the *<u>bottle</u>* 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.</p></div

Means (and standard deviations) for the response times to instrument and object pictures by verb aspect.

<p>Means (and standard deviations) for the response times to instrument and object pictures by verb aspect.</p

Means (and standard deviations) for the response times to object and instrument pictures by verb aspect.

<p>Means (and standard deviations) for the response times to object and instrument pictures by verb aspect.</p

Sample stimuli used in Experiment 1with English translations.

<p>Sample stimuli used in Experiment 1with English translations.</p

Common ERP responses to narrative incoherence in sentence and picture pair comprehension

International audienceUnderstanding the neural processes underlying the comprehension of visual images and sentences remains a major open challenge in cognitive neuroscience. We previously demonstrated with fMRI and DTI that compre-hension of visual images and sentences describing human activities recruits a common extended parietal- temporal-frontal semantic system. The current research tests the hypothesis that this common semantic sys-tem will display similar ERP profiles during processing in these two modalities, providing further support for the common comprehension system. We recorded EEG from naïve subjects as they saw simple narratives made up of a first visual image depicting a human event, followed by a second image that was either a sequentially coherent narrative follow-up, or not, of the first. Incoherent second stimuli depict the same agents but shifted into a different situation. In separate blocks of trials the same protocol was presented using narrative sentence stimuli. Part of the novelty is the comparison of sentence and visual narrative responses. ERPs revealed common neural profiles for narrative processing across image and sentence modalities in the form of early and late central and frontal positivities in response to narrative incoherence. There was an additional posterior positivity only for sentences in a very late window. These results are discussed in the context of ERP signatures of narrative pro-cessing and meaning, and a current model of narrative comprehension

Reading times in milliseconds for individual words (divided by number of syllables per word) for high and low imagers in sequentially coherent and incoherent sentences.

<p>Bars: Standard deviations (* p< 0.05).</p

Mean times in milliseconds for high and low imagers to provide imageability ratings for sequentially coherent and incoherent sentence pairs.

<p>Bars: Standard deviations (*** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01).</p