Eyetracking Study on the Time Course of Aspectual Interpretation in Russian and German

Cross-linguistic study on how the grammatical system of a language shapes semantic interpretation during online comprehension We studied the time course of as- pectual mismatch detection in an aspect language (Russian) and compared it to a non-aspect language (German). In Russian the verb is marked for aspect and thus unambiguously encodes a particular situation type, whereas in a non-aspect language like German aspectual composition depends on a larger linguistic context involving the semantic properties of the arguments. The paper presents an event semantics that allows us to construct semantic representations incrementally from left to right.   In Russian we predicted incremental mismatch detection inde- pendently of the presence or absence of the verbal arguments; in German, however, mismatch effects should be delayed until the semantic processor has encountered the complete predication. This way, the risk of aspectual reanalysis can be minimized. We tested these predictions in two experiments in which we monitored eye movements during reading We employed sentences with (in Russian  perfective) transitive achievement verbs modified by aspectually mismatching durative adverbials in Russian (Exp 1) and German (Exp 2) and manipulated the word order in such a way that the aspectual mismatch occurred before or after the predication was complete.