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We explore the implications of an event-based expectancy generation approach to language understanding, suggesting that one useful strategy employed by comprehenders is to generate expectations about upcoming words. We focus on two questions: (1) What role is played by elements other than verbs in generating expectancies? (2) What connection exists between expectancy generation and event-based knowledge? Because verbs follow their arguments in many constructions (particularly in verb-final languages), deferring expectations until the verb seems inefficient. Both human data and computational modeling suggest that other sentential elements may also play a role in predictive processing and that these constraints often reflect knowledge regarding typical events. We investigated these predictions, using both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony priming. Robust priming obtained when verbs were named aloud following typical agents, patients, instruments, and locations, suggesting that event memory is organized so that nouns denoting entities and objects activate the classes of events in which they typically play a role. These computations are assumed to be an important component of expectancy generation in sentence processing.

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.Keywords verb aspect; event knowledge; semantic priming; sentence processing; ERP On many accounts, the information extracted at a verb serves to activate knowledge of the various roles associated with the action denoted by the verb, as well as structural knowledge regarding how those roles may be expressed. Verbs in general, and their morphologies in particular, also play important roles in theories of sentence processing (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994). Several recent studies have demonstrated that verbs are an important source of information about people's conceptual knowledge concerning specific events, including typical participants, instruments, time course, and duration. Moreover, these studies have provided evidence that such information is available quickly for online use during sentence processing (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Ferretti, McRae, & Hatherell, 2001;McRae, Ferretti, & Amyote, 1997;McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998). The activation of this conceptual information also has been found to be influenced by the inflectional morphology of verbs and participles that signal voice, tense, and aspect (Ferretti, Gagné, & McRae, 2003;Ferretti et al., 2001;Madden & Zwaan, 2003;Magliano & Schleich, 2000). In the present research, we extend these findings by showing how verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge when people read verb phrases appearing either in isolation or within single sentences. Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological AssociationCorrespondence concerning this article should be addressed to Todd R. Ferretti, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Avenue, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5. tferrett@wlu.ca. NIH Public Access Verb Aspect and Language ProcessingThe grammatical category of aspect captures some ways in which language uses morphology to refer to the temporal structure of events (e.g., ongoing versus completed). In this article, we contrast imperfective and perfect aspect. Imperfective aspect makes specific reference to the...

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Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a person was doing) as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what a person did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we think about a person's intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as being more intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The fact that this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replication attempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replication studies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of this effect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0 and −0.24) or imagery (d = −0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results and those of the original study.