Abstract
Sentence-initial temporal clauses headed by before, as in "Before the scientist submitted the paper, the journal changed its policy", have been shown to elicit sustained negative-going brain potentials compared to maximally similar clauses headed by after, as in "After the scientist submitted the paper, the journal changed its policy". Such effects may be due to either one of two potential causes: before clauses may be more difficult than after clauses because they cause the two events in the sentence to be mentioned in an order opposite the order in which they actually occurred, or they may be more difficult because they are ambiguous with regard to whether the event described in the clause actually happened. The present study examined the effect of before and after clauses on sentence processing in both sentence-initial contexts, like those above, and in sentence-final contexts ("The journal changed its policy before/after the scientist submitted the paper"), where an order-of-mention account of the sustained negativity predicts a negativity for after relative to before. There was indeed such a reversal, with before eliciting more negative brain potentials than after in sentence-initial clauses but more positive in sentence-final clauses. The results suggest that the sustained negativity indexes processing costs related to comprehending events that were mentioned out of order.
Highlights
One of the hallmarks of human language is the ability to talk about events that are displaced in time and/or space from the speaker; this includes past events, events that have not happened yet, and possible events that did not happen [1]
The traditional account for this effect is that the before clauses cause the events in the sentence to be mentioned in a different order than the order they occurred in [7]. We compared this to an alternative hypothesis which attributes the difficulty observed in before clauses to interpretational ambiguity with respect to whether the event described by before happened [21, 22]. While these two accounts make the same predictions for temporal clauses in sentence-initial position, they make distinct predictions for clauses in sentence-final position (e.g., "The journal changed its criteria before/ after the scientist submitted the article"): the order-of-mention account predicts the effect to reverse, with after clauses becoming more difficult than before clauses, whereas the account based on interpretational ambiguity does not
The first to use the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) method to investigate the processing of temporal connectives in both sentence-initial and sentence-final position, we observed a reversal of the ERP effect: in sentence-initial position, before clauses elicited more negative ERPs than after, replicating previous findings, whereas in sentence-final position it was after that elicited more negative ERPs than before
Summary
One of the hallmarks of human language is the ability to talk about events that are displaced in time and/or space from the speaker; this includes past events, events that have not happened yet, and possible events that did not happen [1]. Temporal connectives like before and after pose a special challenge to the language comprehension system, as they express relationships between multiple events. Temporal connectives and event-related potentials expressions are used [2,3,4,5,6], the comprehension of temporal expressions, requires sophisticated temporal alignment between multiple events. A well-known phenomenon in the comprehension of temporal connectives is that English sentences beginning with a temporal clause headed by before (1a) engender greater processing cost than those beginning with a temporal clause headed by after (1b). B. After the scientist submitted the paper, the journal changed its policy
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