Underspecification and Aspectual Coercion Martin J. Pickering University of Edinburgh Brian McElree New York University Steven Frisson University of Birmingham Lillian Chen University of Michigan Matthew J. Traxler University of California, Davis In principle, comprehenders might always make immediate commitments to the in- terpretation of expressions (full commitment) or wait until such decisions are neces- sary (minimal commitment; Frazier & Rayner, 1990). One interesting case involves decisions about telicity: whether expressions refer to events that are determinate ver- sus indeterminate with respect to an endpoint. Thus, the insect hopped is apparently determinate, but continuing with a clause beginning with until, in which case hopped must be interpreted as an ongoing activity, is possible. Studies using secondary lexi- cal decision and “stop-making-sense” tasks found that comprehenders experienced difficulty with these continuations, compatible with full commitment (Piñango, Zurif, & Jackendoff, 1999; Todorova, Straub, Badecker, & Frank, 2000a, 2000b). However, we report 2 self-paced reading and 2 eye-tracking experiments that indi- cate readers do not experience any difficulty with these types of mismatches in telicity. We argue that during normal reading, comprehenders do not immediately need to commit fully to the telicity of events and that full commitment may only oc- DISCOURSE PROCESSES, 42(2), 131–155 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Correspondence should be addressed to Martin J. Pickering, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, UK. E-mail: martin.pickering@ed.ac.uk