Abstract
A sentence like 'Lyn has peeled the apple' triggers two types of inferences: a telicity inference that the event is telic; and a culmination inference that the event has reached its telos and has stopped. This results in the final interpretation of the sentence that Lyn has completely peeled the apple. We present an eye-tracking study to test children's ability to predict the upcoming noun (e.g., the apple) during the incremental processing of sentences like 'Look at the picture in which he/she has peeled the…' in which the predicate is telic and the verb appears in the perfective form. By means of the Visual World Paradigm, we aimed to investigate children's ability to use the lexical semantics and aspectual morphology of verbs during language processing. To test if children can predict the target (e.g., a completely peeled apple) by exploiting the lexical-semantic meaning of the verb, we contrasted the target picture with a picture of an object that cannot be peeled; to test if they can predict on the basis of the verb's perfective morphology, we compared the target with the picture of a half-peeled apple. Our results show that Italian children can anticipate the upcoming noun in both cases, providing evidence that children can exploit the morphosyntactic cue on the verb (perfective aspect) to incrementally derive the culmination inference that the telos is reached and the event is completed. We also show that the integration of aspect requires some additional time compared to the integration of the basic lexical semantics of the verb.
Highlights
It is a well-known fact that, during sentence processing, we can anticipate upcoming nouns on the basis of the lexical semantics of prenominal verbs
In this paper we presented a Visual World eye-tracking experiment conducted with Italian children on the incremental processing of telic predicates
Previous results with Mandarin speaking children and adults show that listeners can distinguish between perfective and imperfective morphemes, providing evidence of a rapid integration of aspectual cues during sentence processing
Summary
It is a well-known fact that, during sentence processing, we can anticipate upcoming nouns on the basis of the lexical semantics of prenominal verbs In their pioneer study, Altmann & Kamide (1999) showed that participants anticipated the word ‘cake’ when hearing the verb ‘eat’, which was revealed by increased looks towards the picture of a cake in a visual scenario in which the cake was the only edible object. In another study employing the Visual World Paradigm, Altmann & Kamide (2007) showed that, when participants heard a sentence like ‘The man will drink...’, they looked more at a full glass of beer (in which its content is yet to be drunk), while they looked more at the empty glass of wine when hearing the sentence ‘The man has drunk...’ This suggests that, as listeners, we quickly and incrementally integrate the inference conveyed by the verb’s morphology that an event of drinking has taken place and was completed, resulting in an empty glass. Of their duration, predicates can have a telos (or a culmination point); this property, is not (or not always) intrinsic to the lexical properties of the predicate itself,
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