Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often proce...

This article examines how Russian aspectual pairs from borrowed and colloquial verbs are formed. question is relevant since the most common source languages of loan do not express distinction (imperfective-perfective) morphologically. Seventeen new verbs, which belong to technological sphere, were examined in an online experiment (N=120), native speakers asked form perfective counterparts for a...

This paper reports reaction time studies on aspect processing, and highlights that aspectual asymmetries (perfective vs. imperfective facilitation) in terms of reaction time is dependent on verb types.

Mandarin Chinese as an aspect language (Norman, 1988:163) has a rich inventory of aspect markers, including perfective -le, -guo and imperfective -zhe, zai. Of these -le is the most studied marker because of its mysterious behaviors. For example, is it necessary to differentiate between the perfective -le and the COS le? Does -le indicate completion or termination? Are there any constraints on ...

Aspect contributes important temporal information for the construction of situation models in the human mind. Previous studies examining the effect of grammatical aspect on accomplishment verbs (e.g. bake a cake) show that perfective sentences/utterances are processed faster than imperfective ones (Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Chan et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2004, in press). The present study, however,...

In (3a), the verb root -baalbecomes baadwhen it is followed by causative -is-, applicative -ilor perfective -idi. As seen in (3b) the prefective in realized [idi] when the preceding vowel is /i/, /u/ or /a/. In (3c), however, when the preceding vowel is /e/ or /o/, there is a vowel height harmony and the perfective suffix is realized -ele. In response to this perfect complementarity, a single u...

This study investigated the acquisition of grammatical aspect by Iranian EFL learners. The main question addressed in this study was whether Iranian EFL learners could distinguish conditions under which they must use either the perfective aspect  or imperfective aspect. A group of 110 adult, Persian-Speaking learners of English both at BA and MA levels Took a Michigan test based on which they w...

This experimental study brings evidence from second language acquisition (L2A) to bear on a theoretical issue that has been called into question by native speaker judgments: the semantic effect Russian perfective prefixes have on object interpretation. In perfective sentences, article-less bare plural and mass objects are interpreted as denoting a specific quantity. Russian native speakers do n...

How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment o...

Approved: ________________________ Thesis Supervisor ________________________ Title and Department ________________________ Date ACQUISITION OF THE PERFECTIVE ASPECT MARKER LE OF MANDARIN CHINESE IN DISCOURSE BY AMERICAN COLLEGE LEARNERS