Probabilistic information influences telic vs. atelic representations of Italian predicates in Dowty’s adverbial test: an ERP study at the frequency-semantics interface

We investigated aspectual coercion in native Italian speakers using ERPs during Dowty’s adverbial (in x-time vs. for x-time) telicity test. Twenty-eight participants read sentence stimuli varying in telicity and temporal preposition (in ‘in’ vs. per ‘for’). As a novel contribution, we conducted a prior corpus analysis to quantify the frequency and distribution of verb–preposition combinations in Italian input. This analysis introduced a distributional measure—temporal ratio (TR), calculated as the proportion of temporal uses of a verb–preposition combination relative to all its uses (TR = TF/AF). ERP results showed that telic verbs with low TR values elicited increased frontal negativities at the preposition, consistent with SAN-like effects, with this effect being modulated by acceptability in interaction with scalp region. These findings suggest that aspectual integration is sensitive to distributional information in the input. Verb–preposition combinations with lower TR values elicited stronger SAN-like responses, indicating increased processing costs when temporal interpretations are less strongly supported by prior usage patterns. In contrast, atelic verbs showed weaker and inconsistent ERP responses. Categorical telicity diagnostics alone proved insufficient to predict processing cost. Instead, corpus-derived probabilistic cues such as TR provided a more refined account. We conclude that aspectual interpretation in real time reflects the interplay of lexical aspect and distributional expectations at the frequencysemantics interface