THE PROCESSING OF ASPECTUAL VERBS IN MANDARIN CHINESE

Research in the past few years has investigated the processing costs for sentences such as John began/enjoyed the book. Much of this work has conflated sentences with aspectual verbs, like start or finish, with psychological verbs, like enjoy or tolerate. However, some studies have reported greater costs for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs (e.g., Katsika et al., 2012; Lai et al., 2017), which led to a processing model of aspectual verbs in English, i.e., the Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH). SIH proposes that aspectual verbs lexically encode a function whose value (dimension) must be resolved. This ambiguity resolution is hypothesized to occur at the verb’s complement, where a specific dimension is selected based on context (Piñango & Deo, 2016). Recent research (Lai et al., 2017; Lai, Braze, & Piñango, 2023) has examined SIH, however, mixed effects at aspectual verbs were found in English and they did not explicitly argue for a processing effect at the verb itself. In light of the critical role of the context in SIH, recent research (Lai and Piñango, 2023; Lai, Braze, & Piñango, 2023) has investigated how the interpretations of sentences with aspectual verbs were affected by biased contexts in an offline sentence acceptability judgment study and an online eye-tracking study. However, results of the two studies showed that biased contexts disambiguated the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions offline while processing costs in biased contexts were not found to attenuate costs in real time. It is not clear yet why conflicting results were found.This dissertation reports two studies on the processing of aspectual verbs in Mandarin. The first eye-tracking study investigated the costs of processing aspectual verbs and psychological verb in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed greater costs both for aspectual verbs compared to controls and for aspectual verbs compared to psych verbs, reinforcing the claims of the SIH cross-linguistically (Piñango & Deo, 2016). Strikingly, there was an early effect at the verb for aspectual verbs but not for psychological verbs. We argue that this result, together with previous findings and other conceptual issues, necessitates a conservative modification of the SIH: aspectual verbs are semantically more complex than pschychological verbs. This modification retains the core analysis underlying the SIH, but reconciles the SIH with experimental findings by bringing it in line with the view that lexical semantic complexity has immediate consequences in processing (e.g., Brennan & Pylkkänen, 2010). The second study investigated context effects in the processing of aspectual verbs in Mandarin. The reason why conflicting results were found offline versus online in early studies and the time course of context effects remain unclear, but in the view of this dissertation, it may be due to pragmatic contexts, i.e., descriptions of the utterance context. We used grammatical contexts – two classes of adverbs – in two offline interpretation tasks and a self-paced reading experiment to examine context effects for sentences with aspectual verbs in Mandarin. We found that biased grammatical contexts not only affected the interpretations in the offline tasks, but crucially facilitated processing in the online experiment as well. We conclude that biased grammatical contexts can predetermine the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions immediately in real time. In sum, this dissertation shows that the semantic complexity as found in aspectual verbs in Mandarin can be processed immediately when it is encountered, and the contextual facilitation of the processing of semantically complex expressions can occur in real time.