Recently, Dr. Yue Ji, Assistant Professor of School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Institute of Technology, has made progress in the language and cognition of structure of events, publishing a paper titled Boundedness in event cognition: Viewers spontaneously represent the temporal texture of events in the top journal in the field of linguistics, psychology and cognitive science,Journal of Memory and Language(Impact factor: 4.521; JCR: LINGUISTICS - SSCI(Q1); PSYCHOLOGY - SCIE(Q1); CAS Journal Division: Linguistics 1, Experimental Psychology 1). The first author and corresponding author of this article is Dr. Yue Ji of Beijing University of Technology, and the co-author is Anna Papafragou, a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Our experience of the world involves dynamic streams of visual input but human cognition spontaneously and rapidly organizes this input into “a segment of time with a beginning and an end”. How observers determine the beginnings and ends of events and how they represent texture of events are the centers in the current study of cognitive events. Focusing on the ends of events, this paper explores how viewers track the temporal texture of events by linguistic analysis of events.

Natural language portrays the temporal texture of events through the verb phrase's mood, and a basic semantic feature of the mood is "boundedness". Bounded verb phrases describe events that contain "non-homogeneous" stages of development with an endpoint; unbounded verb phrase describes an event that has a homogeneous internal structure with a specific endpoint. This study reveals that "boundedness" is not only a linguistic concept; observers spontaneously form abstract textures of events in the process of observing events, distinguishing between bounded and unbounded events.

In order to study how viewers track the development of events, the experimental method of disruption detection was innovatively adopted in this research: "disruption" was set in the event material. Some of interferences appeared in the midpoint, while others were close to the end point of the event (Fig. 1). The more attention the material itself attracts, the easier it is for observers to ignore the "distraction". By collecting and analyzing the observer's reaction to "disruption", we can predict the degree of attention of the observer to the different stages of the event.

Fig. 1. "Disruptions" set in the experiment materials

The results show that viewers were more likely to miss a visual disruption of an event stimulus when the disruption occurred close to the event ending compared to the event midpoint. The difference is more pronounced for bounded events (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Proportion of correct responses in whether the observer can detect the "disruption" and the time to detect the "disruption"

Two conclusions can be drawn from the research results: first, boundedness is a psychological and linguistic concept. Second, without the use of language, the viewers will spontaneously track the temporal textures of events, and are sensitive to accumulating change within the boundaries of an event. These conclusions can enrich and improve the existing mental cognitive model of textures of event.

Detailed information of the paper: Ji, Y., & Papafragou, A. (2022). Boundedness in event cognition: Viewers spontaneously represent the temporal texture of events.Journal of Memory and Language, 127, 104353.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2022.104353