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 or
