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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 21, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Verb aspect, event structure, and coreferential processing.

Todd R Ferretti¹, Hannah Rohde, Andrew Kehler

¹Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Avenue, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5.

Journal of Memory and Language

|June 13, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Verb aspect influences how people process sentence meaning. Perfective aspect, indicating completed actions, strengthens biases toward the goal in event descriptions, impacting language comprehension and brain activity.

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Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Published on: September 5, 2019

Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Neuroscience
Linguistics

Background:

Understanding how language users construct meaning from sentences is crucial.
Verb aspect (imperfective vs. perfective) distinguishes ongoing from completed events.
Coreferential processing involves linking pronouns or noun phrases to entities in discourse.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the impact of verb aspect on coreferential processing.
To examine how ongoing versus completed events affect referent selection.
To explore the behavioral and neurocognitive underpinnings of aspectual effects in comprehension.

Main Methods:

Utilized an off-line story continuation task to assess referent biases.
Employed an online event-related potential (ERP) reading task to measure brain responses.
Manipulated verb aspect (imperfective/perfective) in transfer-of-possession sentences.

Main Results:

Participants showed a bias towards the Goal over the Source in continuations.
Perfective aspect significantly strengthened the Goal bias compared to imperfective aspect.
ERP data revealed distinct neural signatures for aspectual differences in Goal bias.

Conclusions:

Verb aspect plays a significant role in shaping situation models during language comprehension.
Behavioral and neurocognitive evidence supports aspect's influence on referent expectations.
Findings contribute to understanding the interplay between grammar, cognition, and neural processing.