Julia Misersky will defend her thesis on Wednesday 29 June
From having a coffee at work to reading a book before bed – we experience a multitude of events on a daily basis. We can learn about events through language, and in our research, we have focused on time in language. Specifically, we studied grammatical aspect, which allows us to describe an event either as completed or ongoing. Such descriptions may affect how we think about, attend to, and memorise event features, such as objects.
Overall, this research results that language can guide event understanding and memory. People especially use the information carried by the verb (e.g., to chop) which captures the essence of what the event is about. The verb defines who is doing what to whom and this impacts how we understand events. The results regarding grammatical aspect are mixed: While aspect may have the potential to affect how we understand and memorise events, such effects do not necessarily arise at all times.
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