Aymeric Collart

• PhD
• PostDoc at Academia Sinica

Reference to the time of an event can be encoded through various devices in language. While the neural processing of time reference in tense languages has been explored through tense inflection, relatively little is known about such processing through aspect in a tenseless language. The current study investigated how Mandarin speakers process perfe...

Past studies have shown that expert interpreters were better than novices at using contextual cues to anticipate upcoming information. However, whether such sensitivity to contextual cues can be traced by means of neural signatures is relatively unexplored. The present study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) along with a language-switching...

The verb you ‘to have’ in standard Mandarin is typically followed by a noun. You can also take a verbal phrase as its complement (‘you + VP’) in several varieties of Mandarin. However, the function associated with this construction is still a matter of debate among linguists: ‘you + VP’ has been analyzed as expressing past tense, perfective aspect,...

How the time reference of a sentence is processed based on the grammatical marking of the verb has already been explored in several languages with grammatical tense and aspect. It can also be grammatically expressed according to the reality status of the event (whether the event exists in time, realis mood, or not, irrealis). This study reports res...

Background: A crucial topic in language processing concerns the dependencies between the words in a sentence. Recent studies indicate that different types of dependencies (e.g., Person or Number agreement) rely on different processing mechanisms, suggesting that specific cognitive principles must be stated for each kind of them. Another example is...

Studies on the processing of temporal reference have flourished in the last decade. Most of them used the 'temporal concord paradigm'. A deictic time adverb (i.e. yesterday or tomorrow), placed at the beginning of the sentence, sets the temporal frame, and the event denoted by the verb is integrated in this frame. This integration can be successful...

In standard Mandarin, you ‘to have’ is a verb expressing the existence/possession of an object [1]. After contact with Southern Min, you has grammaticalized into an auxiliary verb in Taiwan Mandarin (see (1)). Its primary meaning is still under debate: past tense [2], perfective/perfect aspect [1,3], factual/assertive modality [4,5]. Disagreement m...

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This paper surveys the linguistic diversity in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research by examining the languages under investigation in major international conferences from 2012 to 2023. The results showed that these studies are highly skewed towards English in particular and Indo-European languages in general. However, the overall number of...

The mechanisms underlying the processing of the temporal reference of a sentence are still unexplored. Most of the previous psycholinguistic studies used the temporal concord violation between deictic time adverbs and tense marking on the verb to investigate this issue. They found that processing past tense marking is more difficult than non-past t...

Humans are able to represent events in time with several cognitive processes: (a) localizing them on the timeline according to oneself (LOCALIZATION), (b) reasoning about the temporal order between events and sub-events (SEQUENCING), and (c) assessing the belief/truth-value of the existence of the event (EXISTENTIAL), among others [1-3]. The timing...

[To be presented at the AMLaP 2023 conference] Understanding a sentence involves comprehending when the event takes place, but few is known about how humans compute the concord between time adverbs and tense/aspect/modality/mood marking in real time. Previous self-paced reading studies on Indo-European languages indicate that processing past and f...

[Poster to be presented at the AMLaP 2023 conference] Language processing research needs insights from typologically diverse languages. Anand et al. (2011) showed after exploring 4,000 psycholinguistic studies that only 57 languages were represented, and that 85% of the studies involved 10 languages, primarily Indo-European. In this study, we ask...

The occurrence of the Mandarin aspect morphemes -le and -guo as well as the existential construction ‘you (to have) + VP’ in Taiwan Mandarin with deictic time adverbs is discussed in this paper. These markers exhibit certain temporal constraints: their use with deictic past time adverb (e.g., zuotian ‘yesterday’) is grammatical, as exemplified in t...

Existing in time has a cost: A judgment acceptability study on the temporal concord processing of the auxiliary verbs you and hui in Taiwan Mandarin Aymeric Collart, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica How the temporal reference of a sentence (whether the event is interpreted as holding in the past, present or future time) is processed has be...

This chapter reviews the linguistic policies which have been adopted regarding the teaching of indigenous languages in Taiwan since 1987 as well as how they were translated into actions. The design of teaching materials, the training of indigenous language teachers and the creation of the standardized language proficiency tests are discussed in tur...

This chapter discusses the contribution of Formosan languages to models of sentence processing by first reviewing past psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on Formosan languages and then demonstrating why such contributions are crucial to models of language processing. The challenges which can be encountered when conducting psycholingui...

The processing in the brain of the temporal concord of aspect markers in Mandarin has attracted the attention of researchers, but the picture is not complete yet. This study focuses on GUO, the phonological realization of the two morphemes guo1 and guo2. They occur with time adverbs of different natures: guo1 with indefinite time adverbs ('in the p...

The temporal reference of a sentence (i.e., whether the situation described in the sentence is understood as holding in the past, present or future time) can be grammatically expressed with tense (grammatical localization of time; past, present, future), aspect (viewpoint of a temporal structure of a situation; (im)perfective, perfect), or mood mar...

Time, a crucial concept in human cognition, is differently encoded from one language to another. Yet, how time in language is processed in the brain remains unclear, as such an investigation was mainly conducted based on tense marking in Indo-European languages. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how past time is expressed in Mandarin w...

Paper to be presented November 21, 2021 References Baggio, G. (2008). Processing temporal constraints: An ERP study. Language Learning, 58(1), 35–55. Bos, L. S., Dragoy, O., Stowe, L. A., and Bastiaanse, R. (2013). Time reference teased apart from tense: Thinking beyond the present. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 26(2), 283–297. Bott, O. (2010)...

Reference to time, cognitive perception of time as passing by, is encoded with numerous devices in language. Semantically, tense (the “grammaticalized expression of location in time”; past, present and future tenses) and aspect (the “different ways of viewing the internal constituency of a situation”; perfective, perfect and imperfective) can be us...

[Poster to be presented on 2020/10/16] Time reference as a cognitive perception of time is encoded in languages with numerous devices. Since Comrie (1976), a clear difference is made between the semantic categories of tense and aspect. Tense is defined as the "localization of a situation in time", while viewpoint aspect focuses on the internal con...

[Poster to be presented at CUNY-2020; Modalities of the presentation to be defined] In the past years, the way time reference is neurologically processed caught the attention of many researchers. An important distinction is to be made between time at (i) the cognitive level, which seems to be universal, and (ii) at the linguistic level, characteri...

Paper related to the presentation to be given on October 25th, 2019

In past years, the question of processing temporal information (i.e. time reference and aspect) has been raised, and several ERP studies with paradigms involving violation of time reference and/or aspect with tense-prominent languages have been conducted, with the findings suggesting different underlying processes for time reference and aspect. On...

The time representation of a sentence can be encoded with a great variety of linguistic tools. This can lead to different interpretation, such as the ‘completed event’ one. The aspectual perfective particle 'le' has been analyzed as converting such a meaning (Smith, 1997; Klein et al., 2000). Meanwhile, as the verb 'you' (‘to have’) has been gramma...

The aim of this study is to investigate the semantic value of the auxiliary you in Taiwan Mandarin. This auxiliary has long been viewed as denoting perfectivity (Tsai, 2002), while recent analyses argue that it could also be a past tense (Chen, 2010) or a realis marker (Liu, 2011). However, none of these analyses is completely satisfactory, as they...