What is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., “Ebony folded a napkin in 10 seconds” vs. “Ebony did some folding for 10 seconds”) can influence whether the very same visual event is processed as containing distinct temporal stages including a well‐defined (...) endpoint or lacking such structure, respectively. In two experiments, we show that processing (a)telicity in language shifts how people later construe the temporal structure of identical visual stimuli. We conclude that event construals are malleable representations that can align with the linguistic framing of events. (shrink)

Memory of event outcomes is a topic increasingly discussed in the field of event language and cognition. This study approaches how language influences memory of event outcomes from the under-explored perspective of the verb’s “fulfilment type”, a property formulated in Talmy’s event integration theory. This property indicates the extent to which verbs depict fulfilment of intentions. Through two experiments, we explored how verbs’ fulfilment type properties shape the text-based memory of event outcomes according to their perceived likelihood of intention fulfilment. (...) There are two major findings. First, people tend to have “fulfilment preferences” and infer that intention fulfilment is more likely than intention non-fulfilment. Second, intention-unfulfilled event outcomes tend to be remembered better for event descriptions that trigger no fulfilment perferences. This study contributes to event language and memory research by demonstrating how language-generated inferences can influence established memory of event outcomes. (shrink)