Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present eye-tracking reading study investigated the real-time processing of the so-called Lifetime Effect, which involvesthe integration of temporal verb morphology and knowledge ofa referent’s lifetime (alive vs. dead). Critical stimuli containedfamous referents, meaning that their lifetime status is widelyknown. In addition, context sentences mentioned their lifetimestatus and occupation. Tense/aspect was manipulated in a fol-lowing target sentence to contain either the present perfect orthe simple future (e.g., She has performed / will perform...).For dead referents, the target sentence was infelicitous giventhe tense/aspectual marking; for living referents, the mark-ing was felicitous. This design permitted us to examine ef-fects of lifetime status conveyed via world knowledge and lin-guistic context on the processing of tense/aspect morphology.Eye-tracking reading times revealed longer total reading timesat the critical (verb) and post-critical regions for the presentperfect when following a deceased context, while the dead-simple future condition had shorter overall reading times thanany other condition. Naturalness ratings revealed the dead-simple future to be quickly and reliably rejected, while thedead-present perfect was deemed acceptable. However, thelatter was rated significantly lower than the living/present per-fect condition. Taken together, the results imply that worldknowledge and an immediate context defining a real-world ref-erent as being dead or alive can jointly modulate the processingof subsequent verb tense/aspect, but with striking differencesbetween the present perfect and simple future.