Making Semantic Commitments Can Be Delayed: Evidence From Aspectual Processing

Semantic interpretation of aspectual verbs has been shown to cause a processing cost. The present study provides additional evidence that the semantic interpretation of events interacts with sentence processing. The study focused on telicity, an aspectual property that does not solely depend on lexical items but instead on the semantic composition of verb phrase (VP)-level events. Results from a working memory task showed that committing to a …