What’s Done is Done: Verb Aspect and Verbatim Memory

Grammatical verb aspect uses morphosyntactic cues (‘-ed’, ‘-ing’) to convey whether an action is, for example, complete (“walked”) or on-going (“was walking”) and has shown notable comprehension ramifications for a reader’s event model. Additionally, research suggests that the reader quickly forgets verbatim surface-form information, such as morphosyntactic cues, while the event model remains intact. The current study used three different memory tests to probe readers’ event models of the texts, testing readers’ event model at retrieval. More importantly, we explored whether participants could have biased memory for the perfective aspect consistent with events unfolding in the narrative world. We show that verbs in the perfective aspect were remembered more accurately than those in the imperfective aspect. Moreover, imperfective verbs had a stronger tendency to be misremembered as being in the perfective aspect. That is, readers’ memory seems to be affected by the passage of narrative time, rather than maintaining fidelity to the temporal status of the verb at original presentation.

Abstract licence: CC BY

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.