Verb Aspect and the Activation of Event Knowledge

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena ) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating ) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated ). Second, people generat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2007-01, Vol.33 (1), p.182-196
Main Authors: Ferretti, Todd R, Kutas, Marta, McRae, Ken
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral psychophysiology
Biological and medical sciences
Brain - physiology
Cognition & reasoning
Cognition - physiology
Electrophysiology
Evoked Potentials
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Grammar
Human
Humans
Knowledge
Knowledge Level
Language
Language Processing
Linguistics
Memory
Morphemes
Nouns
Phrase Structure
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Semantics
Sentences
Structural Analysis (Linguistics)
Verbs
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Summary:The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena ) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating ) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated ). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as completions to sentence fragments with imperfective than those with perfect aspect. Third, the amplitude of the N400 component to location nouns varies as a function of aspect and typicality, being smallest for imperfective sentences with highly expected locations and largest for imperfective sentences with less expected locations. Fourth, the amplitude of a sustained frontal negativity spanning prepositional phrases is larger following perfect than following imperfective aspect. Taken together, these findings suggest a dynamic interplay between event knowledge and the linguistic stream.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.33.1.182