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.

NMDA receptor activation can elicit synaptic plasticity by augmenting conductance of the AMPA receptor GluA1 subsequent to phosphorylation at S831 by Ca 2+ -dependent kinases. NMDA receptor activation also regulates synaptic plasticity by causing endocytosis of AMPA receptor GluA1. We demonstrate a unique signaling cascade for these processes mediated by NMDA receptor-dependent NO formation and GluA1 S-nitrosylation. Thus, S-nitrosylation of GluA1 at C875 enhances S831 phosphorylation, facilitates the associated AMPA receptor conductance increase, and results in endocytosis by increasing receptor binding to the AP2 protein of the endocytotic machinery.