The findings show that expectations about how objects behave in the world influence our moment-to-moment understanding whether an event is framed as finished or ongoing. Grammar that signals completion makes both the intact and the broken states more instantly available in the mind, while the progressive framing keeps one state more dominant. These effects unfold during reading, indicating that language and real-world knowledge are tightly woven into the mental process of updating what we imagine about objects and actions.
This work matters because it links simple linguistic choices to how people mentally simulate consequences, a skill central to learning, planning, and empathy. For anyone interested in how language shapes thought, education that relies on vivid examples, or design that depends on quick comprehension, these results point to practical levers for clearer communication. Follow the link to see the experiments and imagine how these dynamics play out in classrooms, interfaces, and everyday storytelling.
Abstract
The present study examines how real-world event knowledge and grammatical aspect guide event comprehension. Specifically, we tested whether real-world knowledge about the likelihood of state-change (e.g., wine glasses usually crack when dropped but plastic cups do not) modulates the object state representations that people construct while reading perfective and imperfective sentences. Participants read “rebus” sentences in perfective and imperfective aspect, presented one word at a time, self-paced. In each sentence, the object was replaced by an image of the object that is either likely or unlikely to undergo state-change (e.g., Carlos was dropping/dropped a *wine glass*/*plastic cup* …), depicted in their initial (intact) or end (changed) states. Reaction times to images indicate that real-world knowledge about the likelihood of state-change is recruited when comprehenders construct mental models of events described as completed (perfective aspect, e.g., dropped) as well as events described as ongoing (imperfective aspect, e.g., was dropping). Results also indicate that perfective aspect increases the accessibility of both the initial and end states of objects, compared to imperfective aspect. Overall, these results demonstrate that both non-linguistic information grounded in real-world event knowledge as well as linguistic cues about the temporal structure of events guide how comprehenders dynamically update mental representations of object states in real-time.
