Telicity is an important semantic feature pointing to event construal: telic verb phrases denote bounded events with an inherent endpoint while atelic verb phrases denote unbounded events without such an endpoint. Languages encode telicity in different ways. Unlike English, Mandarin lacks an overt count-mass distinction and allows bare noun objects to form verb phrases. Would this cross-linguistic difference influence event perception? Experiment 1 elicited descriptions of bounded vs. unbounded events from English and Mandarin native speakers. A clear cross-linguistic difference was found: English speakers mostly used telic predicates for bounded events and atelic predicates for unbounded events while Mandarin speakers gave atelic predicates with bare noun objects for both event types. Experiment 2 explored how English and Mandarin speakers tracked the temporal structure of bounded vs. unbounded events. The two language groups performed similarly. The way people describe events may not affect the way they track event temporal profiles.

Logico-semantic theories have long noted parallels between the linguistic representation of temporal entities (events) and spatial entities (objects): bounded (or telic) predicates such as fix a car resemble count nouns such as sandcastle because they are “atoms” with well-defined boundaries. By contrast, unbounded (or atelic) phrases such as drive a car resemble mass nouns such as sand in that they are unspecified for atomic features. Here, we show for the first time that there are similarities in the perceptual-cognitive representation of events and objects in non-linguistic tasks. Specifically, after viewers form a bounded or an unbounded event category, they can extend the category to objects or substances respectively (Experiment 1). Furthermore, viewers can intuitively make event-to-object mappings that respect atomicity (Experiment 2). These striking similarities between the mental representation of events and objects have implications for current theories of event cognition, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Events are considered as temporal segments with a beginning and an endpoint. Philosophical and linguistic literature on events distinguishes between bounded events that include distinct temporal stages leading to culmination (e.g., fix a car) and unbounded events that include largely undifferentiated stages and lack an inherent endpoint (e.g., drive a car). The present study shows that event viewers spontaneously compute this distinction through an interruption detection task. People watched videos of bounded or unbounded events with a visual interruption lasting .03s at the midpoint or close to the endpoint of the event stimulus. People indicated whether they saw an interruption after each video (Experiments 1) or responded as soon as possible during each video (Experiment 2). In both cases, the endpoint-midpoint difference depended on whether participants were watching a bounded or an unbounded event. As people perceive dynamic events, they spontaneously track boundedness, or the internal temporal structure of events.

Events unfold over time, i.e., they have a beginning and endpoint. Previous studies have illustrated the importance of endpoints for event perception and memory (Lakusta & Landau, 2005, 2012; Papafragou, 2010; Strickland & Keil, 2011; Zacks & Swallow, 2007). However, this work has not compared endpoints to other potentially salient points in the internal temporal profile of events (e.g., midpoints) and has only discussed events with a self-evident endpoint. In the present study, we explored sensitivity to event endpoints and midpoints in events of different types. Our results show that people are more disturbed by interruptions at the end compared to interruptions in the middle of an event – but only when perceiving a bounded event (i.e., an event with an inherent endpoint). This finding reveals complex tracking of the abstract internal temporal structure of events during event perception.

The semantic property of boundedness characterizes the presence of well-defined spatio-temporal boundaries for eventsor objects in language (Bach, 1986; Frawly, 1992; Jackendoff, 1991). Little research has tested whether this propertyactually characterizes event and object cognition (but see Wellwood, Hespos, & Rips, 2018). We showed participantsvideos of bounded events where a salient change in state of the affected object(s) occurred (e.g., dressing a teddy bear)and unbounded events that lacked a salient change (e.g., waving a handkerchief). Participants decided whether a videomatched with a picture of a single novel object or a picture of a novel substance (object/substance pictures were adoptedfrom Li, Dunham, & Carey, (2009)). Participants tended to pair a bounded event with an object and an unbounded eventwith a substance, and were in fact better at establishing the former connection. We conclude that boundedness underliesthe cognitive representation of both events and objects.

Events unfold over time, i.e., they have a beginning and endpoint. Previous studies have illustrated the importance ofendpoints for the perception and memory of various events (Lakusta & Landau, 2005, 2012; Papafragou, 2010; Regier & Zheng,2009; Strickland & Keil, 2011; Zacks & Swallow, 2007). However, this work has not compared endpoints to other potentiallysalient points in the internal temporal profile of events (e.g., midpoints). Building on the “picky puppet task” (Waxman &Gelman, 1986), we presented 4-to-5-year-old children and adults with a puppet that liked clips of events containing brief screenblanks that disrupted either the midpoint or the endpoint of the event. Both children and adults learned the puppet’s preferencesbetter (as evidenced by their extension to novel events) when the puppet liked midpoint compared to endpoint interruptions.These findings suggest a bias for event endpoints that is present from an early age.

Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds (RVCs, e.g., bo-kai “peel-open”) consist of two verbal components. The second component (V2) denotes a resultant state associated with the action denoted by the first component (V1) (Tham, 2015). RVCs emerge in child speech by age 2 and become productive at age 3 (Deng, 2010). However, comprehension difficulties persist until age 6 (e.g., Chen, 2016). Given the puzzling gap between early production and delayed comprehension, we conducted an event description and a sentence comprehension experiment to investigate children's knowledge of the compositional nature and resultative meaning of RVCs. In both experiments, we highlighted the contrast between realized and unrealized resultant state in the visual stimuli. 4- and 5-year-olds were sensitive to the result component of RVCs and differentiated RVCs from mono-morphemic V1s. Our findings demonstrate Mandarin-speaking children's ability to map appropriate verb forms onto unfolding events and provide evidence in favor of continuity in language development.

Bounded and unbounded events differ in whether they include an inherent endpoint (Bach, 1986). Even though this distinction can be important for the way events are identified and processed, the literature on event cognition has not focused on such abstract aspects of event structure. In the present study, we asked whether viewers are sensitive to the distinction between bounded and unbounded events in a category learning task. Our results show that people were more successful in forming the category of bounded events than that of unbounded events. We discuss implications of this finding for event cognition.

This study addresses the interaction between language and event cognition. Previous research has shown that viewers follow perceptual and conceptual features of event structure, and these features influence how they process events. Here, we examine whether events are processed in different ways when preceded by descriptions that contrast in lexical aspect. In our experiment, viewers watched fifteen short movie clips and were asked to indicate whether they saw an interruption. Interruptions occurred in either the midpoint or the late point of the events. We found that telic vs. atelic sentences shown prior to the movie clips influenced event construal and hence the detection of interruptions at midpoints vs. endpoints. This novel finding supports a mapping between lexical aspect in language and temporal structure-building in event apprehension. Our study provides direct experimental evidence for the role of language as a top-down conceptual cue in event processing.

Aspectual coercion occurs when there is a semantic mismatch between constituents in terms of their lexical aspect. If people fully commit to an aspectual alternative (telic or atelic), one should see the reflections of this shift in their behavior. Here we introduce a new paradigm that can reliably detect how (and whether) comprehenders process aspectual coercion to commit to an aspectual alternative as they inspect the referential world of dynamic events. In two experiments, viewers watched short movie clips and were asked to indicate whether they saw an interruption. Interruptions occurred at either the midpoint or the endpoint of the events. Telic vs. atelic sentences with and without coercion were shown prior to the movie clips. Of interest was whether processing the sentences would influence event construal and hence the detection of interruptions at midpoints vs. endpoints. Our findings reveal cognitive signatures of aspectual coercion in how comprehenders inspect the visual world of events.