Investigating the Interplay Between Morphosyntax and Event Comprehension From the Perspective of Intersecting Object Histories

In a series of sentence-picture verification studies we contrasted, for example, "... choose the balloon with "... inflate the balloon" and "... the inflated balloon" to examine the degree to which different representational components of event representation (specifically,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2024-06, Vol.50 (6), p.985-1012
Main Authors: Prystauka, Yanina, Wing, Emma, Altmann, Gerry T. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Balloons
Climate change
Cognition & reasoning
Comprehension
Comprehension - physiology
Consciousness
Female
Human
Humans
Male
Morphology (Language)
Object Recognition
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Psycholinguistics
Reading
Semantics
Syntax
Verbs
Young Adult
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Summary:In a series of sentence-picture verification studies we contrasted, for example, "... choose the balloon with "... inflate the balloon" and "... the inflated balloon" to examine the degree to which different representational components of event representation (specifically, the different object states entailed by the inflating event; minimally, the balloon in its uninflated and inflated states) are jointly activated after state-change verbs and past participles derived from them. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the initial and end states are both activated after state-change verbs, but that the initial state is considerably less accessible after participles. Experiment 3 showed that intensifier adverbs (e.g., completely) before both state-change verbs and participles further modulate the accessibility of the initial state. And in Experiment 4, we ruled out the possibility that the initial state is accessible only because of the semantic overlap. We conclude that although state-change verbs activate representations of both the initial and end states of their event participants, their accessibility is graded, modulated by the morphosyntactic devices used to describe the event.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/xlm0001307