We provide a computational account of the integration of various constraints proposed to be involved in the resolution of the direct object/sentence complement ambiguity. In the first part, competition-integration simulations show that a constraint-based model accounts for the results of Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, and Lotocky (1997) at least as well as the garden-path model. In the second part, we compare the efficacy of norming techniques for capturing plausibility effects. Simulations show that norms designed to tap people's conceptual knowledge of events better capture plausibility effects than do norms that are biased toward tapping linguistic knowledge. We conclude that local information concerning event plausibility is an important constraint for understanding ambiguity resolution.

We examined how grammatical aspect and visual perspective taking (first- or third-person) influence the abilityto imagine accomplishments. Our main prediction was that it would be easier to imagine completed (I had built the fence.)than ongoing events (I was building the fence.) because accomplishments include natural temporal end points. Slow corticalbrain potentials were examined as an index of the difficulty associated with imagining. Our results showed that participantshad more difficulty imagining ongoing than completed accomplishments, and that it was easier to imagine from the third-versus first-person perspective. The ability of participants to imagine from different visual perspectives was not influencedby grammatical aspect. Participants indicated that the people in their imagined events were more vivid when they imaginedongoing versus completed accomplishments, as well as when they imagined from a third- versus first-person perspective. Asexpected, grammatical aspect influenced which temporal components of events were imagined.

The ability to imagine events is important to regular thought processes such as remembering and understanding theworld in general. Two EEG experiments were conducted to investigate the difficulty associated with imagining activities fromdifferent visual perspectives. Experiment 1 involved participants imagining ongoing activities (e.g., I was skating) from a firstand third person perspective. Experiment 2 involved completed activities (I skated) and also included a condition in whichparticipants imagined other people from a third person perspective (Karen skated). Slow cortical brain potentials revealed thatthe third-person perspective was generally the most difficult to imagine and that the third-person-self perspective was moredifficult than the third-person-other perspective. Imagining activities as ongoing or completed did not influence the pattern ofresults. This research provides novel neurocognitive and behavioural insight into how event representation is influenced bytemporal information associated with verbs and the perspective from which an event is represented.