Abstract
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.
Highlights
Everyday conversation is replete with reports of when and how events have occurred in the past
How does grammatical information influence our understanding of events, especially the reporting of past events? How does it interact with information about when an event has occurred, recent past vs. distant past? Here, we use a mouse-tracking task to explore how grammatical aspect and tense interact in perceptual simulations influence the comprehension of event descriptions
In analyzing drop locations, we found that aspectual information influenced where participants placed the character in the scene, with an additive influence of temporal context
Summary
Everyday conversation is replete with reports of when and how events have occurred in the past. The results showed that participants mentioned more actions when completing sentences with past progressive adverbial clauses In another experiment, participants read simple transitive sentences that implied a state change in objects, simple past “John painted houses last summer” or past progressive “John was painting houses last summer,” and estimated how many houses had been painted. Madden and Zwann (2003) conducted several experiments that incorporated event descriptions with pictures to investigate how aspectual cues shapes the construction of situation models (see Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998, for discussion of situation models) They were especially interested in perfective and imperfective aspect (corresponding to English simple past and past progressive). Different aspectual cues were shown to yield real time processing differences with event descriptions (for similar findings, see Morrow, 1985; Magliano and Schleich, 2000; Ferretti et al, 2007; Madden and Therriault, 2009; Bergen and Wheeler, 2010)
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