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...

the current paper is an outlook toward lexical aspect and its types exist as a semantic parameter in verb and indicate trend of doing task of verb in terms of continuance, iteration, duration etc. although discourse aspect is considered as independent factor in verb morphology, but the resultant syntactic reflection does not solely corresponds to grammatical aspect; instead, it includes lexical...

When processing sentences about perceptible scenes and performable actions, language understanders activate perceptual and motor systems to perform mental simulations of those events. But little is known about exactly what linguistic elements activate modality-specific systems during language processing. While it is known that content words, like nouns and verbs, influence the content of a ment...

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with...

Previous research in child language acquisition identifies discrepancies between child and adult use of verbal inflectional morphology In this paper, we consider a case of partial undergeneralization where children's use of the-ed and-ing endings seems constrained by the aspectual class of the host verb. Children, more than adults, seem reluctant to generalize the imperfective morpheme to state...

This dissertation is about the structure of temporal semantics and children’s acquisition of temporal language. It argues for the importance of investigating semantics both at the abstract level of linguistic structures and at the concrete level of the time-course of acquisition, as these two levels provide natural constraints for each other. With respect to semantics, it provides a computation...