This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.

Introduction States’ decisions not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could potentially affect access to care and health status among their low-income residents. Methods The 2010–2012 nationally representative Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data were analyzed in 2015 to compare 9755 low-income adults aged 18–64 years from Medicaid-expanding states with 7455 adults from nonexpanding states. Multivariate logistic regression models were fitted to evaluate the differences in access to care, receipt of preventive services, quality of care, attitudes about health and self-reported health status by Medicaid expansion status. The differences in care utilization and medical expenditures between the two groups were examined using a 2-part modeling approach. Results Compared to their counterparts in Medicaid expansion states, low income adults in the nonexpanding states were more likely to be black and reside in rural areas and were less likely to have a usual source of care (prevalence ratio[PR] 0.86, 95% confidence interval[CI] 0.82–0.91) and recommended preventive services such as dental checkups (PR = 0.86; CI = 0.79–0.94), routine checks (PR = 0.89; CI = 0.83–0.95), flu vaccinations (PR = 0.89; CI = 0.81–0.98), and blood pressure checks (PR = 0.96; CI = 0.94–0.99). They also had less care utilization, fewer prescriptions, and less medical expenditures, but more out-of-pocket expenditures (all p-value <0.05). Conclusions Low-income adults in Medicaid nonexpanding states, who are disproportionately represented by blacks and rural residents, were worse off for multiple health-related outcomes compared to their counterparts in Medicaid expanding states at the baseline of ACA implementation, suggesting that low income adults residing in nonexpanding states may benefit markedly from the expansion of Medicaid.