Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 133, Issue 1, October 2014, Pages 262-276
Cognition

Grammatical aspect and event recognition in children’s online sentence comprehension

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We investigate children’s use of grammatical aspect in sentence comprehension.

  • Eye-movement patterns are compared in different aspectual conditions.

  • Hearing the perfective aspect versus the imperfective aspect yield different eye gaze patterns.

  • Grammatical aspect functions to facilitate event recognition during sentence comprehension.

  • Children use the abstract aspectual information as rapidly as adults in sentence comprehension.

Abstract

This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme –le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme –zhe. The perfective morpheme –le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme –zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. We were interested to see whether young children are able to use the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (i.e., completed versus ongoing) as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested 34 Mandarin-speaking adults and 99 Mandarin-speaking children (35 three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds). On each trial, participants were presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event. Participants’ eye movements were recorded from the onset of the spoken sentences. The results show that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme –le triggered more eye movements to the completed event area, whereas hearing the durative morpheme –zhe triggered more eye movements to the ongoing event area. This effect occurred immediately after the onset of the aspectual morpheme, both for the adults and the three groups of children. This is evidence that young children are able to use the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition. Children’s eye movement patterns reflect a rapid mapping of grammatical aspect onto the temporal structures of events depicted in the visual scene.

Introduction

Language comprehension involves the rapid integration of different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. Understanding the mechanism underlying this rapid process is a central component of the study of language comprehension. Research on adult sentence processing has demonstrated that when interpreting a sentence, the human sentence processing mechanism (or the parser), incrementally computes the structural representation and possible meanings of the sentence while drawing on different sources of linguistic and non-linguistic information (e.g., Altmann and Kamide, 1999, Altmann and Kamide, 2007, DeLong et al., 2005, Kamide et al., 2003, Omaki, 2010, Pickering et al., 2000, Staub and Clifton, 2006, Tanenhaus et al., 1995, Van Berkum et al., 2005). Much research has examined this rapid and incremental nature of the processing mechanism, of which a key question that has been widely investigated is the role of event knowledge in sentence comprehension (Elman, 2009, Madden and Ferretti, 2009). Knowledge about events includes typical event participants, causal relationships between participants and objects, instruments, time course, and duration (McRae et al., 2005, Zacks and Tversky, 2001, Zacks et al., 2001). Verbs are an important source of information about events. Previous research found that event information associated with verbs can be used quickly by adults during online sentence comprehension (Altmann and Kamide, 1999, Ferretti et al., 2001, McRae et al., 1998). For example, Altmann and Kamide (1999) found that when interpreting a sentence, the argument structure (i.e., typical event participants) associated with verbs was activated immediately to predict the upcoming object noun phrase, which resulted in anticipatory eye movements towards the most plausible object in the visual display (see also Altmann and Kamide, 2007, Boland, 2005). In the study, the participants heard sentences like (1) and (2) while viewing an image of a scene with a boy, a cake, and a few toys.

In (1) the verb eat can take only one of the objects in the visual scene as its argument, namely the cake, whereas the verb move in (2) can take any of the objects as its argument. Altmann and Kamide found that the participants were more likely to fixate on the picture of a cake when hearing (1) The boy will eat… than when hearing (2) The boy will move…. This effect occurred even before the onset of the object noun cake. This is evidence that event information associated with verbs can be used immediately by adults to facilitate sentence comprehension.

The immediate activation of event information during online sentence comprehension has also been found to be influenced by the morphology of verbs that signals tense and aspect (Altmann and Kamide, 2007, Becker et al., 2013, Carreiras et al., 1997, Ferretti et al., 2003, Ferretti et al., 2007, Ferretti et al., 2009, Ferretti et al., 2001, Madden and Zwaan, 2003, Magliano and Schleich, 2000). Human languages often use morphology to refer to the temporal structures of events (e.g., ongoing versus completed). In this paper, we focus on the contrast between the imperfective versus perfective aspect. Imperfective aspect makes specific reference to the internal structure of events by focusing on the ongoing process, but makes no reference to their completion. Perfective aspect refers to events as completed by focusing on the endpoint of the events rather than the ongoing process/internal structure (Comrie, 1976, Smith, 1991). English uses grammatical morphemes to mark aspect. Consider (3a) and (3b), for example. (3a) contains the grammatical morpheme –ing, which makes it clear that the event of planting a flower is currently in progress. By contrast, (3b) contains the grammatical morpheme –ed, which indicates that the event of planting a flower has been completed.

The examples illustrate that the use of grammatical morphemes is closely related to the temporal structures of events, e.g., whether the event is ongoing or has been completed. Previous research found that the aspectual information encoded in grammatical morphemes can be used immediately by adults to construct representations of events during sentence comprehension. For example, using a picture verification task, Madden and Zwaan (2003) found that English-speaking adults were more likely to choose the picture depicting an completed event when reading a sentence containing a perfective morpheme (e.g., –ed), but they chose both pictures (e.g., one depicted a completed event and one described an ongoing event) equally often when reading a sentence containing an imperfective morpheme (e.g., –ing). Madden and Zwaan interpreted the finding as evidence that when encountering an event described in the perfective aspect, English-speaking adults constructed a representation of the event as having been completed. By contrast, when encountering an event described in the imperfective aspect, they constructed a representation of the event as having both intermediate phases and endpoint. Other event information encoded in aspectual morphemes like event location and participant roles has also been found to play an important role in sentence comprehension (e.g., Carreiras et al., 1997, Ferretti et al., 2007).

Taken together, previous research has shown that event information associated with verbs and verb morphology plays an important role in sentence comprehension. Adults can use the information immediately and effectively to construct representations of events. Previous research on child sentence processing found that like adults, children are also able to use the argument structure (i.e., typical event participants) associated with verbs to anticipate upcoming referents (Andreu et al., 2013, Fernald et al., 2008, Nation et al., 2003). For example, children also exhibited anticipatory eye movements to the edible objects upon hearing a sentence containing the verb eat (e.g., (1)). Similar to adults, this effect occurred before the onset of the object noun, e.g., cake. This is evidence that event information associated with verbs can be activated immediately by children in online sentence comprehension.

Using off-line judgement tasks, Wagner and colleagues found that three-year-old English-speaking children already make a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect (e.g., Wagner, 2001, Wagner, 2006, Wagner and Carey, 2003). However, as far as we know, no previous studies have looked at children’s online use of grammatical aspect, i.e., whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes (e.g., ongoing versus completed) function to facilitate children’s event recognition during online sentence comprehension. The present study addresses this question by investigating young Mandarin-speaking children’s use of grammatical aspect in online sentence comprehension. This is the first study to explore the role of grammatical aspect in children’s event recognition during online sentence comprehension. In order to use this abstract aspectual information to facilitate event recognition, children need to establish the mapping between grammatical aspect and the temporal structures of events. For example, children need to understand that the perfective aspect refers to a completed event, whereas the imperfective aspect refers to an ongoing event. In other words, the immediate use of grammatical aspect in online sentence comprehension requires the ability to quickly map the temporal reference encoded in aspectual morphemes onto the events under consideration. The development of this ability involves the development of the concept of time – one of the fundamental domains in human cognition, as well as the knowledge of how linguistic devices are used to encode time (e.g., grammatical morphemes). Thus, by investigating whether or not the temporal reference encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition, the present study will contribute to our understanding of how children develop the mapping between their concept of time and their knowledge of how time is encoded in language. The findings will also contribute to our understanding of the development of the incremental sentence processing mechanism in children. Previous research found that children can use abstract grammatical features of human language, like grammatical gender and case markers, to facilitate sentence comprehension (Choi and Trueswell, 2010, Lew-Williams and Fernald, 2007, Sekerina and Trueswell, 2012, Van Heugten and Shi, 2009). By looking at another abstract grammatical feature of human language – grammatical aspect, the present study will add further evidence for the incremental nature of the human sentence processing mechanism. In addition, most previous studies on the role of grammatical aspect in sentence comprehension have been limited to Indo-European languages (English mainly), and very few studies have looked at the question from a cross-linguistic perspective. By focusing on Mandarin Chinese, the present study is the first to look at the role of grammatical aspect in sentence comprehension in a language that is typologically distinct from English. The findings will thus provide cross-linguistic evidence attesting to the role of grammatical aspect in sentence comprehension.

Before presenting the experimental studies, we briefly discuss grammatical aspect in Mandarin Chinese. Like English, Mandarin Chinese also uses grammatical morphemes to mark grammatical aspect. There are four primary grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese: the progressive morpheme zai–, the durative morpheme –zhe, the perfective morpheme –le, and the experiential morpheme –guo (Chao, 1968, Li and Thompson, 1981, Yang, 1995). In the present study, we focus on the contrast between the perfective morpheme –le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme –zhe. The perfective morpheme –le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme –zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. Sentences (4a) and (4b) are used to illustrate. Throughout the text, PERF is used to indicate a perfective morpheme, and DUR is used to indicate a durative morpheme. In (4a), the durative morpheme –zhe is attached to the verb zhong ‘plant’, which indicates that the event of planting a flower is still in progress. But if the durative morpheme is replaced by the perfective morpheme –le, as in (4b), then the sentence indicates that the event of planting a flower has been completed.

The present study takes advantage of the contrast between the two aspectual morphemes to investigate whether the temporal information encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (e.g., ongoing versus completed) function to facilitate children’s event recognition during online sentence comprehension. More specifically, the question we ask is: when children (and adults) hear sentences like (4a) and (4b), will they be able to activate the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes immediately to facilitate their event recognition in online sentence comprehension (i.e., the perfective morpheme –le refers to a completed event and the durative morpheme –zhe refers to an ongoing event). We use the visual world eye-tracking paradigm. On each trial, children will be presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes (e.g., (4a) or (4b)) while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event (see Fig. 1). Children’s eye movements will be recorded. We anticipate that if children are able to activate the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes to facilitate their event recognition in online sentence comprehension, then they should look more to the completed event (e.g., the upper panel of Fig. 1) after hearing the perfective morpheme –le than after hearing the durative morpheme –zhe. By contrast, they would be expected to look more to the ongoing event (e.g., the lower panel of Fig. 1) after hearing the durative morpheme –zhe than after hearing the perfective morpheme –le. Mandarin Chinese is ideally suited for investigating the role of grammatical aspect in online sentence comprehension, since sentences containing the two aspectual morphemes form minimal pairs (e.g., (4a) and (4b)).

Section snippets

Participants

Thirty-four Mandarin-speaking adults (mean age 24, range 22–25, 20 women and 14 men) and 99 monolingual Mandarin-speaking children participated in the experiment. The child participants were divided into three age groups: 35 children were between the ages of 3;5 and 3;11 (mean age 3;6, 20 boys and 15 girls), 32 children were between the ages of 4;0 and 4;11 (mean age 4;5, 16 boys and 16 girls) and 32 children were between the ages of 5;1 and 5;11 (mean 5;6, 18 boys and 14 girls). The adult

Results

We computed the proportion of fixations in each 200 ms time window over a time period of 1800 ms following the onset of the aspectual morpheme in the two critical categories: the completed event area and the ongoing event area. To provide an overview of the eye movement data, the results are first presented in the form of descriptive graphs followed by more detailed statistical analyses.

Fig. 3 shows the proportion of fixations of adults in the completed event area (upper panel) and in the ongoing

General discussion

In the present study, we sought to investigate whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we found that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme –le triggered more eye movements to the completed event

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Macquarie University Research Fellowship to the first author. We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. We would also like to thank the language acquisition research group of Beijing Language and Culture University headed by Professor Liqun Gao for their assistance and support in running the experiments. Of course we thank the children and adults who took part in the experiments

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