Assessing aspectual asymmetries in human language processing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0058/000058Abstract
Human mind constructs mental models of events and situations that unfold in the world around us. Previous studies indicate that various cues contribute to the dynamic representation of these mental models. Madden and Zwaan (2003) have shown that, with respect to accomplishment verbs, perfective sentences (e.g. He lit a fire) are processed faster than imperfective sentences (e.g. He was lighting a fire). This perfective advantage was also found in a number of East Asian languages—e.g. Cantonese (Chan et al., 2004) and Japanese (Yap et al., in press). In this paper we report a series of reaction time studies that investigate the effect of both grammatical aspect and lexical aspect on language processing (see Yap et al., 2006 and Wong, 2006 for detailed discussions). We further discuss issues of interests that have implications for our understanding of cognitive processing.
References
Chan, Y.H., Yap, F.H., Shirai Y. and Matthews, S. 2004. A perfective-imperfective asymmetry in language processing: Evidence from Cantonese. Proc. 9th ICLL, 383-391. ASGIL, National Taiwan University, Taipei.
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Madden, C.J. and Zwaan, R.A. 2003. How does verb aspect constrain event representation? Memory & Cognition, 31, 663-672.
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Wong, F. 2006. Reaction time study on inherent lexical aspect asymmetry in Cantonese. Unpublished senior thesis in Linguistics. Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Yap, F. H., Kwan, W.M., Yiu, S.M., Chu, C.K., Wong, F., Matthews, S. and Shirai, Y. 2006. Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: significance of lexical aspect. Paper presented at the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancouver, July 26-29.
Yap, F. H., Inoue, Y., Shirai Y., Matthews, S., Wong, Y.W., and Chan, Y.H. (in press). Aspectual asymmetries in Japanese: Evidence from a reaction time study. Japanese/Korean Linguistics, vol. 14. Stanford, CSLI.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Foong Ha Yap (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
