Adapting game content to a particular player’s needs and expertise constitutes an important aspect in game design. Most research in this direction has focused on adapting game difficulty to keep the player engaged in the game. Dynamic difficulty adjustment, however, focuses on one aspect of the gameplay experience by adjusting the content to increase or decrease perceived challenge. In this pap...

Grammatical aspect is known to shape event understanding. However, little is known about how it interacts with other important temporal information, such as recent and distant past. The current work uses computer-mouse tracking (Spivey et al., 2005) to explore the interaction of aspect and temporal context. Participants in our experiment listened to past motion event descriptions that varied ac...

Two experiments examine how grammatical verb aspect constrains our understanding of events. According to linguistic theory, an event described in the perfect aspect (John had opened the bottle) should evoke a mental representation of a finished event with focus on the resulting object, whereas an event described in the imperfective aspect (John was opening the bottle) should evoke a representat...

In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative ...

This study investigates the effect of grammatical aspect marking in Dutch sentences, on speakers’ estimations of the duration of highly familiar, everyday events. We first established the ‘inherent’ or natural duration of different events (Exp. 1). This was then used for the manipulation of aspect (Exp. 2). Participants dragged a slider across the computer screen to estimate the duration of pro...

The ability to imagine events is important to regular thought processes such as remembering and understanding the world in general. Two EEG experiments were conducted to investigate the difficulty associated with imagining activities from different visual perspectives. Experiment 1 involved participants imagining ongoing activities (e.g., I was skating) from a first and third person perspective...

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...