Time in narrative comprehension

Zwaan, Rolf A.; Madden, Carol J.; Stanfield, Robert A.

doi:10.1075/upal.35.06zwa

Cited by 19 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…Results from behavioral studies suggest that people are slower and less accurate when reading sentences that start with "before" compared to "after" (Mandler, 1986). Such results have been explained as reflecting people's default expectation that narrated events occur in chronological order, called the iconicity assumption (Zwaan, Madden, & Stanfield, 2001), which is flaunted by sentence-initial "before." Moreover, a classic study by Münte, Schiltz, and Kutas (1998) suggested that "before" incurs immediate and long-lasting processing costs compared to "after."…”

Section: The Activation Of Event Knowledge During Language Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 91%

The Truth Before and After: Brain Potentials Reveal Automatic Activation of Event Knowledge during Sentence Comprehension

Nieuwland

2015

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Abstract■ How does knowledge of real-world events shape our understanding of incoming language? Do temporal terms like "before" and "after" impact the online recruitment of real-world event knowledge? These questions were addressed in two ERP experiments, wherein participants read sentences that started with "before" or "after" and contained a critical word that rendered each sentence true or false (e.g., "Before/After the global economic crisis, securing a mortgage was easy/harder"). The critical words were matched on predictability, rated truth value, and semantic relatedness to the words in the sentence. Regardless of whether participants explicitly verified the sentences or not, false-aftersentences elicited larger N400s than true-after-sentences, consistent with the well-established finding that semantic retrieval of concepts is facilitated when they are consistent with real-world knowledge. However, although the truth judgments did not differ between before-and after-sentences, no such sentence N400 truth value effect occurred in before-sentences, whereas falsebefore-sentences elicited an enhanced subsequent positive ERPs. The temporal term "before" itself elicited more negative ERPs at central electrode channels than "after." These patterns of results show that, irrespective of ultimate sentence truth value judgments, semantic retrieval of concepts is momentarily facilitated when they are consistent with the known event outcome compared to when they are not. However, this inappropriate facilitation incurs later processing costs as reflected in the subsequent positive ERP deflections. The results suggest that automatic activation of event knowledge can impede the incremental semantic processes required to establish sentence truth value. ■

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Section: The Activation Of Event Knowledge During Language Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 91%

The Truth Before and After: Brain Potentials Reveal Automatic Activation of Event Knowledge during Sentence Comprehension

Nieuwland

2015

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…Thus, the data by Sell and Kaschak together with the data of this replication advocate the idea that the backfront timeline is automatically involved in comprehending short stories when temporal information about large time shifts need to be monitored across sentences. For example, comprehenders may need to build up a mental situation model that matches the temporal order of reported events during the processing of discourse information (Zwaan, Madden, & Stanfield, 2001). By contrast, comprehenders may manage temporal order information without the involvement of the mental timeline when temporal complexity does not get the upper hand.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Replication of ``Processing time shifts affects the execution of motor responses (Sell & Kaschak, 2011; Experiment 1)''

Scheifele¹,

Eikmeier²,

Alex-Ruf³

et al. 2018

TQMP

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The present study is a replication of Sell and Kaschak's (2011) Experiment 1 (Movement Condition). The original stimulus material (short texts compromising three sentences) was translated from English into German. We successfully replicated the basic congruency effect of the original study, that is, the interaction effect between direction of manual response and time reference when participants perform a sensicality judgment. In contrast to the original study, this congruency effect was not significantly modulated by the magnitude of time shift. Nevertheless, when the congruency effect was evaluated separately for large and small time shifts, it was significant for large but not for small time shifts. In sum, this replication reinforces the basic conclusion by Sell and Kaschak that the timeline becomes automatically activated when processing temporal sentence information, especially when the time shift is large.

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“…For that reason, the order in which events are reported in discourse normally follows their chronological order. However, the default temporal order can be overridden with temporal adverbials, which can be observed in narratives (Ter Meulen, 1995;Zwaan, Madden & Stanfield, 2001). There are also some more idiosyncratic ways of structuring temporal relations in language.…”

Section: Time In Linguistic Construalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complementarity of Space and Time in Distance Representations

Waliński¹

2014

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Time in narrative comprehension

Cited by 19 publications

References 0 publications

The Truth Before and After: Brain Potentials Reveal Automatic Activation of Event Knowledge during Sentence Comprehension

The Truth Before and After: Brain Potentials Reveal Automatic Activation of Event Knowledge during Sentence Comprehension

A Replication of ``Processing time shifts affects the execution of motor responses (Sell & Kaschak, 2011; Experiment 1)''

Complementarity of Space and Time in Distance Representations

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