TY - JOUR
T1 - Temporal construal in sentence comprehension depends on linguistically encoded event structure
AU - Marx, Elena
AU - Wittenberg, Eva
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s)
PY - 2025/1
Y1 - 2025/1
N2 - How events are ordered in time is one of the most fundamental pieces of information guiding our understanding of the world. Linguistically, this order is often not mentioned explicitly. Here, we propose that the mental construal of temporal order in language comprehension is based on event-structural properties. This prediction is based on a central distinction between states and events both in event perception and language: In perception, dynamic events are more salient than static states. In language, stative and eventive predicates also differ, both in their grammatical behavior and how they are processed. Consistent with our predictions, data from seven pre-registered video-sentence matching experiments, each conducted in English and German (total N = 674), show that people draw temporal inferences based on this difference: States precede events. Our findings not only arbitrate between different theories of temporal language comprehension; they also advance theoretical models of how two different cognitive capacities - event cognition and language - integrate to form a mental representation of time.
AB - How events are ordered in time is one of the most fundamental pieces of information guiding our understanding of the world. Linguistically, this order is often not mentioned explicitly. Here, we propose that the mental construal of temporal order in language comprehension is based on event-structural properties. This prediction is based on a central distinction between states and events both in event perception and language: In perception, dynamic events are more salient than static states. In language, stative and eventive predicates also differ, both in their grammatical behavior and how they are processed. Consistent with our predictions, data from seven pre-registered video-sentence matching experiments, each conducted in English and German (total N = 674), show that people draw temporal inferences based on this difference: States precede events. Our findings not only arbitrate between different theories of temporal language comprehension; they also advance theoretical models of how two different cognitive capacities - event cognition and language - integrate to form a mental representation of time.
KW - Discourse pragmatics
KW - Event cognition
KW - Linguistic event type
KW - Relative clauses
KW - Temporal construal
KW - Video-sentence matching task
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85206512237&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105975
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105975
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85206512237
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 254
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
M1 - 105975
ER -