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Title:
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Aspect and Causal Inferences: The Role of Temporal Coherence in a Process Model of Inference Generation in Text Comprehension
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Author:
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Andreas Schramm
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Email:
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Degree Date:
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1998
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Psycholinguistics
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Director(s):
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Charles Fletcher
Jeanette Gundel
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Abstract:
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The semantic domain of aspect in natural language is complex and elusive. Aspect presents the time structure of events as opposed to tense, which locates events in time. For example, the imperfective aspect in "Pat was eating the apple" focuses the process of eating as unbounded, while the perfective aspect in "Pat ate the apple" expresses the entire event as bounded. In this dissertation, I use a theory that describes aspect in two components: the time structure of events and its presentation. I present results from psycholinguistic research applying this theory to inferential processes in text comprehension.
Research in text comprehension has shown that readers remember situations better and perceive them as more important if they are causally related. The role of aspect in inferring causal relations is demonstrated in three experiments. In the experiments, I use the following manipulation to examine whether readers more readily access distant imperfective than perfective antecedents when a more recent causal antecedent is available. Participants read texts with two possible causal antecedents for a consequent situation. In one of the stories, "Pat was eating the apple" was the first antecedent; "The janitor was mopping the floor" was the second; and "Pat was cringing in agony" was the consequent. The two antecedents appeared in consecutive sentences in the text, and the aspect in the earlier antecedent was manipulated ("Pat ate/was eating the apple"). All texts were presented in a long and a short version, with the long version containing backgrounding filler material between the antecedents and the consequent. All experiments contained an on-line and an off-line part; the purpose of the on-line part was to test the processing component of inferencing, and the purpose of the off-line part was to test its memory component. The on-line parts were speeded-recognition tasks and verbal protocols. The off-line part was a question-answering task that immediately followed the on-line part. The results suggest that antecedents in the imperfective aspect are more available for consequents than perfective ones (both while reading and during recall), but that both text length and experimental task have a noticeable impact on inferencing.
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