Madden-Lombardi Carol, Dominey Peter Ford, Ventre-Dominey Jocelyne
Université Lyon 1, INSERM U1208, Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute, Integrative Neuroscience Department, Bron, France.
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon, France.
PLoS One. 2017 Dec 29;12(12):e0189919. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189919. eCollection 2017.
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 representation of the event as ongoing, including all stages of the event, and focusing all entities relevant to the ongoing action (instruments, objects, agents, locations, etc.). To test this idea, participants saw rebus sentences in the perfect and imperfective aspect, presented one word at a time, self-paced. In each sentence, the instrument and the recipient of the action were replaced by pictures (John was using/had used a corkscrew to open the bottle at the restaurant). Time to process the two images as well as speed and accuracy on sensibility judgments were measured. Although experimental sentences always made sense, half of the object and instrument pictures did not match the temporal constraints of the verb. For instance, in perfect sentences aspect-congruent trials presented an image of the corkscrew closed (no longer in-use) and the wine bottle fully open. The aspect-incongruent yet still sensible versions either replaced the corkscrew with an in-use corkscrew (open, in-hand) or the bottle image with a half-opened bottle. In this case, the participant would still respond "yes", but with longer expected response times. A three-way interaction among Verb Aspect, Sentence Role, and Temporal Match on image processing times showed that participants were faster to process images that matched rather than mismatched the aspect of the verb, especially for resulting objects in perfect sentences. A second experiment replicated and extended the results to confirm that this was not due to the placement of the object in the sentence. These two experiments extend previous research, showing how verb aspect drives not only the temporal structure of event representation, but also the focus on specific roles of the event. More generally, the findings of visual match during online sentence-picture processing are consistent with theories of perceptual simulation.
两项实验研究了语法动词时态如何限制我们对事件的理解。根据语言学理论，用完成时态描述的事件（约翰已经打开了瓶子）应该唤起一个已完成事件的心理表征，重点在于产生的结果对象；而用未完成时态描述的事件（约翰正在打开瓶子）应该唤起该事件正在进行的表征，包括事件的所有阶段，并聚焦于与正在进行的动作相关的所有实体（工具、对象、施动者、地点等）。为了验证这一观点，参与者以自定节奏每次看一个单词的方式，观看了用完成时态和未完成时态呈现的画谜句子。在每个句子中，动作的工具和接受者被图片所取代（约翰正在使用/已经使用一个开瓶器在餐厅打开瓶子）。测量了处理这两张图片的时间以及对合理性判断的速度和准确性。尽管实验句子总是有意义的，但一半的对象和工具图片与动词的时间限制不匹配。例如，在完成时态句子的时态一致试验中，呈现的是一个关闭的开瓶器（不再使用）和一个完全打开的酒瓶的图片。时态不一致但仍然合理的版本要么用一个正在使用的开瓶器（打开的，拿在手中）替换开瓶器，要么用一个半开的瓶子替换酒瓶图片。在这种情况下，参与者仍然会回答“是”，但预期的反应时间会更长。动词时态、句子角色和时间匹配在图像处理时间上的三因素交互作用表明，参与者处理与动词时态匹配而非不匹配的图片速度更快，尤其是对于完成时态句子中的结果对象。第二个实验重复并扩展了这些结果，以确认这不是由于对象在句子中的位置所致。这两项实验扩展了先前的研究，表明动词时态不仅驱动事件表征的时间结构，还驱动对事件特定角色的关注。更一般地说，在线句子 - 图片处理过程中的视觉匹配结果与感知模拟理论一致。
