Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does linguistic telicity map onto mental representations of events? Recent work suggests considerable flexibility in how people mentally represent temporal event structure, yet we know little about how linguistic cues modulate these representations. We investigated how different forms of quantization correspond to event construal using a novel experimental paradigm that bridges event perception and linguistic processing. Participants first learned to distinguish bounded from unbounded events, then categorized sentences varying in quantization strength. Our results revealed a systematic relationship between linguistic form and event representation: strongly quantized expressions ("drink one beer") reliably corresponded to bounded event construal and activity descriptions ("did some writing") to unbounded interpretations, while bare plurals ("drink beers") showed genuine flexibility in interpretation. This graded pattern indicates that temporal boundedness in cognition operates along a continuum, with linguistic cues providing weighted probabilistic constraints on event representations. The findings demonstrate how different linguistic forms correspond to varying degrees of flexibility in event understanding, contributing to our knowledge of how language interfaces with event cognition.