Sentences such as “The pop singer began the album” are ambiguous between an agentive reading (The pop singer began recording/listening to/etc. the album) and a constitutive reading (The pop singer’s song was contained in the first track of the album). The ambiguity is rooted in the meaning specification of a semantic class, the “aspectual verb class.” This semantic verb class demands that its complement be construed as a structured individual along a dimension (e.g., spatial, informational, eventive...). In the case of “begin the album,” the complement “the album” can be construed as a set of singing eventualities (a structured individual construed along the eventive dimension) or as a set of songs (a structured individual construed along the informational dimension). Previous work has shown that real-time sentence composition profile of these verbs is consistent with the implementation of two processes (a) exhaustive lexical-function retrieval and (b) construal of multiple dimension-specific structured individuals, leading to agentive and constitutive readings. Which dimension-specific structured individual is chosen ultimately depends on which dimension biases are present in the context. Understanding the real-time behavior of aspectual-verb composition under different contexts (agentive vs. constitutive) provides a glimpse into the time-course of context modulation during real-time sentence comprehension. Results from an eye-tracking study comparing agentive vs. constitutive readings of these sentences show not only the standard effect of the aspectual-verb composition, previously reported for the agentive readings, but also a comparable processing profile for the constitutive readings, a novel finding supporting the unified linguistic analysis and corresponding processing implementation of the two readings. Results also show that regardless of reading, the aspectual-verb composition effect is observable even after the complement has been retrieved, and interpretation has been disambiguated, thus indicating that the above two-step process is a nonnegotiable component of the interpretation of the verb+complement composition and therefore must take place before preceding context can serve as a sentence-external constraining force. Moreover, the sustained nature of the cost suggests that all possible dimension-specific structured individuals are being construed at least immediately after the complement has been retrieved, consistent with comprehenders’ intuitions. This suggests that although not directly relevant for the interpretation at issue those meaning construals are not incompatible with the complement’s conceptual representation, and therefore need not be “pruned.” Overall, the pattern observed suggests a model of comprehension whereby context is allowed to modulate sentence interpretation once the fundamental lexico-semantic compositional processes of the sentence have taken place.

Sentences like “The athlete jumped for 20 minutes / jogged for 2 years.” engender an iterative meaning that is well understood yet morpho-syntactically unsupported—a case manifesting “meaning underspecification.” We argue that such underspecified meaning results from a costly meaning search in the sentential context by evaluating (a) the conventional event duration denoted by the verb, (b) the interval length denoted by the for-adverbial, and (c) the discourse context if there is one. In a naturalness-rating questionnaire and a self- paced reading experiment, we crossed two verb types (Punctual: jump / Durative: jog) and the interval-lengths denoted by for-adverbials (Short: for 20 minutes / Long: for 2 years). In addition, we investigated the impact of individuals’ cognitive styles indexed by autistic tendency on real-time meaning computation. Results showed that, in the absence of discourse context, (i) the harder a specific meaning could be determined from sentential context, the less natural the sentence was perceived, (ii) all sentences with underspecified meaning engendered significantly longer reading times regardless of verb type. Moreover, (iii) individuals with higher autistic tendency lingered significantly longer at the sentence-final region, likely reflecting a difficulty in information integration or a tendency towards deliberative reasoning. These findings suggest that meaning comprehension is lexically-guided and context-constraining, while the online processing profile vary with individuals’ autistic tendency.