Living in the present - how referent lifetime influences processing of past, present (perfect), and future tenses

The English present perfect and simple future tenses are felicitous with the living, but not the dead, as a referent must exist at reference time. In contrast, the simple past is odd with living referents in out-of-the-blue statements, as it requires a specified or implied past reference time. We employed eye-tracking during reading (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading (Experiments 2 and 3) in order to explore how (referent) lifetime-tense congruence influences processing across three English tenses. Referent-lifetime contexts (e.g., Jimi Hendrix was an American musician. He died in London.) were followed by critical sentences in the present perfect (Experiments 1-3), simple future (Experiments 1 and 2), and the simple past (Experiment 3) (e.g., He has performed/will perform/performed in numerous music festivals.). Lifetime-tense congruence effects in reading times and naturalness responses emerged in all three tenses, but with differences in the latency, magnitude, and direction of effects: Longer reading times were elicited by the present perfect (Experiments 1-3) and simple past (Experiment 3) in incongruent (versus congruent) lifetime-tense conditions, with earlier and larger congruence effects in the present perfect. Conversely, the simple future elicited shorter reading times and reaction times in the incongruent condition (Experiments 1 and 2). All incongruent lifetime-tense conditions elicited lower naturalness judgements than congruent conditions, suggesting metalinguistic awareness of the violations, with the largest effect in the simple future condition. Our findings provide the first evidence of processing costs associated with violations of the Perfect Lifetime Effect, and contribute to the existing literature exploring the distribution and processing of (English) tenses.