The Origin of the States-Preceding-Actions Inference

One of the most foundational human cognitive abilities is to understand the order of events in time: What happens when. Many linguistic event descriptions, however, lack explicit information about temporal order, requiring comprehenders to infer the temporal relations between events. How do people do this? Our previous research shows that people consistently infer event order based on how dynamic each described event is: Static states are understood to precede dynamic events. This project investigates the origins of the States-Preceding-Actions inference: Does it arise from a purely linguistic strategy, or does it reflect a broader cognitive principle?

We address this question through two objectives. In Objective 1, we investigate whether the States-Preceding-Actions inference holds across languages, despite substantial variation in how event dynamicity is encoded in languages spoken in in the Danube region and in France. Objective 2 explores whether the states-before-events inference extends beyond language to other cognitive modalities by extending the methodology to visual scenes. Together, these objectives aim to uncover the linguistic and cognitive foundations of temporal order inference, thereby advancing our understanding of how mental representations of time are formed across languages and cognitive domains.