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We examined how grammatical aspect and visual perspective taking (first- or third-person) influence the abilityto imagine accomplishments. Our main prediction was that it would be easier to imagine completed (I had built the fence.)than ongoing events (I was building the fence.) because accomplishments include natural temporal end points. Slow corticalbrain potentials were examined as an index of the difficulty associated with imagining. Our results showed that participantshad more difficulty imagining ongoing than completed accomplishments, and that it was easier to imagine from the third-versus first-person perspective. The ability of participants to imagine from different visual perspectives was not influencedby grammatical aspect. Participants indicated that the people in their imagined events were more vivid when they imaginedongoing versus completed accomplishments, as well as when they imagined from a third- versus first-person perspective. Asexpected, grammatical aspect influenced which temporal components of events were imagined.

The ability to imagine events is important to regular thought processes such as remembering and understanding theworld in general. Two EEG experiments were conducted to investigate the difficulty associated with imagining activities fromdifferent visual perspectives. Experiment 1 involved participants imagining ongoing activities (e.g., I was skating) from a firstand third person perspective. Experiment 2 involved completed activities (I skated) and also included a condition in whichparticipants imagined other people from a third person perspective (Karen skated). Slow cortical brain potentials revealed thatthe third-person perspective was generally the most difficult to imagine and that the third-person-self perspective was moredifficult than the third-person-other perspective. Imagining activities as ongoing or completed did not influence the pattern ofresults. This research provides novel neurocognitive and behavioural insight into how event representation is influenced bytemporal information associated with verbs and the perspective from which an event is represented.

We provide a computational account of the integration of various constraints proposed to be involved in the resolution of the direct object/sentence complement ambiguity. In the first part, competition-integration simulations show that a constraint-based model accounts for the results of Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, and Lotocky (1997) at least as well as the garden-path model. In the second part, we compare the efficacy of norming techniques for capturing plausibility effects. Simulations show that norms designed to tap people's conceptual knowledge of events better capture plausibility effects than do norms that are biased toward tapping linguistic knowledge. We conclude that local information concerning event plausibility is an important constraint for understanding ambiguity resolution.

We used ERP methodology to investigate how readers validate discourse concepts and update situation models when those concepts followed factive (e.g., knew) and nonfactive (e.g., "guessed") verbs, and also when they were true, false, or indeterminate with reference to previous discourse. Following factive verbs, early (P2) and later brain components (N400 and late frontal positivity) revealed that relative to true concepts, both false and indeterminate concepts were more difficult to validate, and only indeterminate concepts were ultimately updated into the situation model. Following nonfactive verbs, there was no evidence of situational model updating for any condition. However, there was a clear N400 gradient that suggests the lower commitment of nonfactive verbs leads to less incongruence with discourse context for the indeterminate condition than the false condition. These results provide novel insight into how pragmatic constraints afforded by verbs influence discourse validation and the updating of situation models. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures, and 2 footnotes.)

We used an off-line story continuation task and an online ERP reading task to investigate coreferential processing following sentences that portrayed transfer-of-possession events as either ongoing or completed, using imperfective and perfective verb aspect (e.g., Amanda was shifting/shifted some poker chips to Scott). The story continuation task demonstrated that people were more likely to begin continuations with references to the Goal than to the Source, but that perfective aspect strengthened this bias. In the ERP task we probed expectations for Source and Goal referents by employing pronouns that matched one of the referents in gender. The ERP results were consistent with the biases revealed in the story continuation task and demonstrate that the difference in Goal bias for the two forms of aspect was manifested differently in the brain. These results provide novel behavioral and neurocognitive evidence that verb aspect influences the construction of situation models during language comprehension. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)

We examined how verb factivity influences the ability of readers to detect and resolve the mismatch of receiving false referents in relation to true referents in discourse contexts. Factive verbs (e.g., know), but not nonfactive verbs (believe), entail the truth of their complements. Recent research by Singer [Singer, M. (2006). Verification of text ideas during reading. "Journal of Memory and Language," 54, 574-591] suggests that there are pragmatic costs associated with knowing something that is clearly false and only believing something that is clearly true. However, because Singer measured reading times for full sentences, it could not be determined whether these costs were initiated upon the appearance of the critical target word (i.e., the word that validated or invalidated previous text ideas) or at a later point in the sentences. In the present research we recorded event-related brain potentials while people read the same passages for comprehension and analyzed potentials evoked to the critical target words. Our results demonstrate that the brain distinguishes between true and false target words by at least 200ms after their onset, and that the pragmatic costs identified by Singer lead to interactions between verb factivity and truth in both early (P2) and later occurring brain components (late phase of N400 and late frontal positivity). In general, the results suggest readers had greater difficulty integrating false nouns than true nouns following factive than nonfactive verbs, and that detection of this mismatch also occurred earlier following factive verbs. Our results provide insight into the time-course of the processes that underlie the verification of text ideas, and extend neurocognitive research on anaphoric resolution. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.)

Proverbs tend to have meanings that are true both literally and figuratively (i.e., Lightning really doesn't strike the same place twice). Consequently, discourse contexts that invite a literal reading of a proverb should provide more conceptual overlap with the proverb, resulting in more rapid processing, than will contexts biased towards a non-literal reading. Despite this, previous research has failed to find the predicted processing advantage in reading times for familiar proverbs when presented in a literally biasing context. We investigate this issue further by employing both ERP methodology and a self-paced reading task and, second, by creating an item set that controls for problems with items employed in earlier studies. Our results indicate that although people do not take longer to read proverbs in the literally and proverbially biasing contexts, people have less difficulty integrating the statements in literal than figurative contexts, as shown by the ERP data. These differences emerge at the third word of the proverbs.

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.

The authors examined how people integrate knowledge of agents and patients of events with the temporal and causal properties of present and past participles to constrain interpretation of isolated participle-noun phrases like arresting cop and arrested crook. Good-agent head nouns were more easily combined with present participles (e.g., arresting cop) than with past participles (e.g., arrested cop), and the reverse was true for good patients. Furthermore, present-participle good-patient phrases (e.g., serving customer) were often interpreted as verb phrases. This research provides further evidence of the interaction between morphosyntactic cues and world knowledge of events in language comprehension.

The thematic roles of verbs have been investigated in a series of three experiments. Single-word priming of agents, patients, instruments and locations; single-word priming of features common to a verbs' patients, and modulation by syntactic cues in cross-modal sentence priming are explored.