Effect of tense, aspect and aspectual class on event knowledge activation: A study with turkish adults

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Enformatik Enstitüsü, Bilişsel Bilimler Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2015

Öğrenci: ŞEVKİ YÖNTEM

Danışman: CEYHAN TEMÜRCÜ

Özet:

In this study we aimed to investigate effects of tense, aspect and lexical aspect on the activation of event knowledge. To this end, we conducted a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) experiment, in which participants encountered a one-word sentence as a prime and reacted to a locational target word via speech. We analyzed response times with respect to aspect, tense and relatedness between prime and target words. Participants’ memory spans, measured by a backward digit span task, were also included in the analyses. We found out that tense, viewpoint aspect and relatedness had no significant effect on reaction times, hence on the level of activation of latent locational arguments. However, at the level of lexical aspect, stative verbs showed more priming effect on locational nouns as compared to non-stative verbs (activities, accomplishments and achievements).