Abstract

This article investigates how English-speaking children interpret imperfective and perfective participles used attributively in a prenominal position, as in ‘burning/burned candle’. These participles exhibit a pure aspectual distinction between ongoing and completion that is independent of the temporal entailments contributed by a finite verb. This article reports results from 45 children (1;6–6;8) who participated in an experiment investigating whether they know that the two types of adjectival participles are used to pick out different situations; namely, the imperfective participles map onto ongoing events and the perfective participles map onto completed events (Klein, On times and arguments, 2004). We found that the elimination of the tense-aspect interaction resulted in an improved results compared to those in Wagner (Journal of Child Language 29: 109–125, 2002). However, the results in this article as well as those from Wagner's (Journal of Child Language 29: 109–125, 2002) study of grammatical aspect morphology both find that children do not master the aspectual distinction before around age 5 when object-related information is given — in the absence of agency cues.