Situation Types in Language.

Two experiments examined whether situation types (Vendler, 1957) are represented differently during sentence comprehension. In the first experiment participants read sentences of different situation types followed by a star-clicking task. Situation type did not influence response times on the subsequent task. The second experiment showed that matching situation types did not prime each other, but participants judged achievement sentences more accurately than accomplishments and activities. These results suggest that situation types are not represented differently, but we argue that their underlying characteristics may affect sentence processing causing task specific effects. Implications of these data with respect to the classical and experiential based theories are also discussed.