Processing events: Aspectual coercion in self-paced reading and magnetoencephalography

Introduction. That semantic type-mismatch can have measurable effects on processing has been robustly demonstrated for complement coercion, where an event-selecting verb coerces an entity-denoting object into an event predicate (1) (e.g., McElree et al., 2001). A similar shift has been proposed for aspect when a punctual verb combines with a durative modifier, yielding an iterative interpretation (2). Aspectual mismatch has been reported as costly in secondary lexical decision (Pinango et al., 1999, 2006) and in a stop-making-sense task (Todorova et al., 2000). However, studies using more natural reading have yielded mixed results (Pickering et al., 2006; Husband et al., 2006). Thus the representation and processing of aspectual coercion remains poorly understood.