The representational product of sentence comprehension is the result of the interplay between episodic and semantic memory and our knowledge of the grammatical devices of our language which guide how we retrieve information from these systems. Past participles, being a part of speech derived from verbs but used in a prenominal position (e.g. words like dried) create an interesting test case to examine the effect of morphosyntax on sentence-level meaning representation: on the one hand, they share eventive attributes with state change verbs and, on the other hand, they serve a modifying function, similarly to adjectives. The present dissertation investigated the representational content of prenominal past participles. We considered two hypotheses. The eventive reading hypothesis predicts that participles activate both the resulting and the initial states entailed by the root verb they are derived from. The stative reading hypothesis predicts activation of only the linguistically denoted state. What distinguishes between these two accounts is activation of the initial state, which we took as a marker of eventivity. Two behavioral sentence-picture verification tasks examined the meaning of participles by testing how internal state representations instantiated during reading map onto the external ones presented at the sentence offset. Additionally, an fMRI sentence-comprehension task examined the meaning of participles during the course of language comprehension, where state representations are evoked by the unfolding language. Across two behavioral experiments, we demonstrated reduced accessibility of the initial state following participles and ruled out the interpretation that the initial state is fully blocked. Overall, we concluded that our results lend support to the stative hypothesis, whereby the final representational product of sentences with participles is the target contextually relevant state. The fMRI experiment further refined this interpretation by suggesting that there is interference between two incompatible state representation and active suppression of the situationally-irrelevant state. All three experiments also replicated the finding that both the initial and end states are accessible after state change verbs. We concluded with a discussion of the role of morphosyntax in controlling the interplay between episodic and semantic memory. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]