Verb Aspect and Situation Models

Abstract

The role of verb aspect in the construction of situation models was examined in this study. Participants read stories that contained a sentence that described an activity that either was completed (i.e., perfective aspect) or was in progress (i.e., imperfective aspect), and three subsequent sentences that could be interpreted as either subsequent to or concurrent with the target sentence activity. Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that in-progress activities had a higher likelihood of being perceived as ongoing in the subsequent context than did completed activities. Furthermore, verb aspect and world knowledge have an interactive impact in understanding the duration of narrative events. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that the activation of in-progress activities decayed at a slower rate than completed activities. The results of this study support the claim that grammatical markers provide processing instructions for situation model construction and the maintenance of information in working memory.

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