The Time-Course and Cost of Telicity Inferences

Recent evidence suggests that perceivers have consistent intuitions regarding the boundedness properties of objects and events (Solomon, Proctor, & Rips, in preparation). This paper presents a self-paced reading study examining the speed and accuracy with which readers draw such telicity inferences during on-line language comprehension. Participants read sentences containing either a consumption verb (“consume”) or an observation verb (“monitor”) followed by either a mass or a count object (“ice water” vs. “ice cube”). Each sentence ended with an adverbial phrase that was either consistent or inconsistent with the telicity of the preceding event description (“in” or “for” adverbials), along with a comprehension question. Reading-time results suggest that comprehenders are slow to draw telicity inferences, even when the type of verb unambiguously determines the telicity of the sentence. However, responses to post-sentential comprehension questions suggest that verb and noun information together have a surprisingly robust influence on comprehenders’ telicity inferences, even in the face of supposedly unambiguous adverbial information. Together, these results suggest that comprehenders make use of all relevant information in making telicity inferences, but that they do so much more slowly than strongly incremental models of natural language understanding would predict (e.g., Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980).