Younger and Older Adults' Use of Verb Aspect and World Knowledge in the Online Interpretation of Discourse

Abstract

Eye tracking was used to explore the role of grammatical aspect and world knowledge in establishing temporal relationships across sentences in discourse. Younger and older adult participants read short passages that included sentences such as Mrs. Adams was knitting/knitted a new sweater… She wore her new garment…. Readers had greater difficulty processing the second event (She wore...) if it followed the imperfective (was knitting) rather than the perfective (knitted) version of the earlier-mentioned event. This suggests that aspect information is encoded online and that the “in progress” interpretation of the imperfective impeded integration of the second event into the discourse model. However, world knowledge modulated the effect: When the first event was of short duration (e.g., writing a check), the influence of aspect was not evident in the early moments of processing. These effects were independent of age group, suggesting that the mechanisms involved in coordinating temporal information in discourse are stable across the adult lifespan.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Meredyth Daneman and Craig G. Chambers. We thank Joseph Magliano, PhD, for providing access to the materials used in Magliano and Schleich (2000).

Notes

¹ Although these analyses were conducted in logit space, raw probabilities are reported for easier interpretation.

² Second pass fixation times also confirmed that older adults are more likely to revisit previous text. However, this measure is not discussed in more detail because it revealed no other significant main effects or interactions with the text variables of interest.