The effect of grammatical aspect on mental representations of events: ERP evidence from English and Russian

Grammatical aspect encodes the stage of an event: in progress (imperfective) or completed (perfective). However, little is known about the effect of aspect on mental representations of event stage. To fill this gap, we conducted an ERP study in two languages with distinct aspectual systems: dual-aspectual Russian and partially-aspectual English. Native speakers of Russian (n = 20) and English (n = 20) looked at pictures of in-progress and completed events and read their perfective or imperfective descriptions. In Russian, late positivity elicited by perfective after in-progress pictures indicated a bottom-up process triggered by the violation of a highly specific expectation based on the event stage in the picture. In English, perfective after in-progress pictures elicited a sustained negativity. This effect suggested a top-down effort to update the initial mental model to reconcile it with the non-matching aspectual information.