38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 2025

I recently presented my latest work at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP), held March 27-29, 2025, and hosted in-person by the University of Maryland, College Park. The conference featured a special session entitled “Connecting Minds, Building Bridges: Community Outreach in Language Processing Research.”

(A)telic Diversity: Evidence from a Novel Meaning Categorization Task

My presentation focused on aspectual theory and event construal, introducing a novel experimental paradigm called Concept Extension to Language (CELA). This methodology allows us to directly measure how strongly participants commit to the presence or absence of an event endpoint for telic and atelic phrases.

Key Findings:

• Our results reveal previously unnoticed diversity in aspectual interpretation, enriching the traditional binary telic/atelic distinction
• Different linguistic devices for expressing quantization show systematic variation in how strongly they promote bounded vs. unbounded event construals
• We found a clear gradient effect across quantization types:
  • Number-quantized phrases (“John drew one balloon”) elicited the strongest bounded construals (82%)
  • Indefinite-quantized phrases (“John drew a balloon”) showed strong but less definitive bounded construals (69%)
  • Bare plurals (“John drew balloons”) were more ambiguous, showing no significant bias (49%)
  • “Did some Ving” constructions (“John did some drawing”) reliably triggered unbounded interpretations (28%)

Experimental Approach:

This study employed a creative methodology combining visual event categorization with linguistic judgment tasks:

1. Training phase: Participants learned to categorize visual events as bounded (having an endpoint) or unbounded (lacking an endpoint)
2. Event testing phase: Participants categorized novel videos to demonstrate understanding
3. Sentence testing phase: Participants read 16 sentences with different quantization types and categorized them based on boundedness

Our findings support compositional theories of aspect and demonstrate how language interfaces with event cognition. The gradient pattern observed suggests that telicity operates along a continuum sensitive to fine-grained linguistic cues in addition to the binary distinction.

Collaborators:

This research was conducted in collaboration with:

• Yue Ji (Beijing Institute of Technology)
• Anna Papafragou (University of Pennsylvania)

The work was supported by NSF Grant BCS-2041171 awarded to Anna Papafragou.

For more information about the conference, please visit the HSP 2025 website.

Presenting my research on (A)telic Diversity at HSP 2025