The progressive is a linguistic structure that focuses on the dynamics of an event, which is construed as happening in the moment of a story's time frame. With the sentence John was going to the store (past progressive) the unfolding of an event is emphasized, whereas with the sentence John went to the store (simple past) the end state is emphasized. Grammatical aspect has the ability to specify fine-grained temporal differences that are implied. Language taps into this capacity by directing how one thinks of a particular event (Givón, 1992). The capacity to think about past, present or future events is a fundamental cognitive ability (Zacks and Tversky, 2001). Thus, eye movement data suggest that visual inputs or an explicit task are unnecessary to solicit analog representations of features such as movement, that could be a key perceptual component to grammatical comprehension. The results showed that the distribution and timing of eye movements mirrors the underlying conceptual structure of this linguistic difference in the absence of any visual stimuli or task constraint: Fixations were shorter and saccades were more dispersed across the screen, as if thinking about more dynamic events when listening to the past progressive stories. This study compared the comprehension of sentences with two different grammatical forms: the past progressive (e.g., was walking), which emphasizes the ongoing nature of actions, and the simple past (e.g., walked), which emphasizes the end-state of an action. Eyetracking paradigms that use pictures as a measure of word or sentence comprehension are sometimes touted as ecologically invalid because pictures and explicit tasks are not always present during language comprehension. Recent research using eye-tracking typically relies on constrained visual contexts in particular goal-oriented contexts, viewing a small array of objects on a computer screen and performing some overt decision or identification.
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