The Hidden Semantics of Time: to adore implicitly lasts longer than to bite

Does to sneeze or to age implicitly convey the time scales at which we experience these events? To age appears to capture a persistent or durative state in life, whereas to sneeze appears more punctual in time. Here, we tested whether the meaning of verbs, outside of discourse or sentential context, implicitly convey an inner sense of time. For this, we used a series of categorization tasks to evaluate the implicit associations of verb meaning with psychological duration. Participants categorized verbs according to their linguistic aspect (punctual/durative) and according to four timeframes (temporal categorization). Last, we tested the association between linguistic aspect and psychological timeframes. We report reliable aspectual and temporal categorizations of verbs and, crucially, implicit associations between aspect and timeframe. Our findings suggest that outside sentential contexts, verbs implicitly convey timing information. These results have important implications for the understudied semantics and conceptual aspects of time in Human psychology and psycholinguistics.