Title: Is walking or has walked: An Exploration of Tense and Aspect Comprehension
Speaker: Maria Payne
Date: March 27, 2013; 12-1 PM
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Description: This talk will present the findings of an honors thesis project and is part of the students honors thesis defense (open to all).
Abstract:
Prior studies of sentence comprehension have found processing differences between sentences based on temporal reference: imperfective aspect (John is eating) is processed faster than perfective aspect (John has eaten). One account of this difference is that imperfect aspect may drive language users to mentally simulate an ongoing event while perfect aspect may not. If the implied completion of an event does have an effect on sentence comprehension, then present tense may also be processed faster than past tense. However, the influence of verb tense and aspect on sentence comprehension has not been systematically investigated to date. This study examined processing of sentences with different tense and aspect (tense: past vs. present; aspect: simple, progressive, perfect) using a sentence semantic judgment task. In order to further test the account of “mental simulation” during sentence comprehension, this study also compared processing times for sentences that implied motion towards or away from the body (and the keyboard response was either congruent or incongruent with this motion). This study also tested three persons with agrammatic aphasia, a clinical group in which tense production is significantly impaired. These findings further our understanding of how tense and aspect influence sentence processing, and have implications for understanding tense deficits in persons with aphasia. Theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed.
