Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated the processing and interpretation of aspectual coercion in the case of non-culminating accomplishments in English and German. Two offline experiments employing an inference rating task showed that non-culminating accomplishments in both languages actually involve a shift in interpretation. Four self-paced reading experiments furthermore show that this type of coercion isn't costly - neither in German, a language lacking grammatical aspect, nor in English with an aspectual opposition between progressive and perfective forms. This lack of effect in processing coercion was obtained in a first pair of experiments using adverbial modification (sentence-internally) within the verb phrase and in a second pair of experiments in which aspectual coercion was triggered in a subsequent discourse unit. A final stops-making-sense experiment replicates the lack of effect for English and furthermore shows that the processing of non-culminating accomplishments does not incur a processing effect even in a task calling for immediate full interpretation.