I’ll Never Grow Up: Adult and Child Understanding of Aspect

This paper revisits the aspectual under-extension found in children’s production data, in which children preferentially link telic predicates with perfective/past morphology and atelic predicates with imperfective/present morphology. I argue that these aspectual groupings reflect a deep property of linguistic/conceptual organization and are manifested in various ways throughout the lifespan. The results of a new sentence comparison task show that adults judge sentences which conform to the children’s under-extended groupings as better than those which do not.