Aspect manipulation reveals reliance on abstract syntax in event interpretation

A central question in sentence processing is whether listeners recruit abstract syntactic structure, independent of verb-specific lexical semantics, to build event representations during real-time comprehension. We probe this with grammatical aspect, which can foreground an ongoing or completed event phase only when an event structure is already available. In two visual-world experiments, English speakers heard double-object sentences with progressive or perfect aspect while viewing scenes with an agent, a recipient, and a masked theme. When the sentences contained ditransitive verbs (Experiment 1), aspect modulated looks in real time to possible theme locations beside the agent and recipient, indicating that listeners tracked which participant possesses the theme across event phases. With novel denominalised verbs that cannot supply a recipient or transfer relation (Experiment 2), this agent-versus-recipient pattern persisted, indicating that listeners rely on abstract double-object syntax to construct a transfer event structure, with aspect modulating which object state is currently salient.