The Influence of Temporal Order Information in General Event Knowledge on Language Comprehension

Abstract

Abstract. The coding of chronological order of real-life events, that is, “time’s arrow” in general event knowledge and its access in language comprehension was investigated with two relatedness judgment tasks. The temporal orientation (chronological or reverse) and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 200/250 ms or 1,000 ms) between preinformation and target were manipulated. The first experiment examined highly familiar sequences of events (e.g., lighting-burning-extinguishing) with the same strength of temporal relatedness for preceding and succeeding events. The second experiment investigated individual events. The results show that time’s arrow is not restricted to sequences of events, but is also embedded in the mental representation of individual events. The preferred temporal orientation in favor of future time is not only coded by a higher association strength between mental event representations, but also by expectancy based selection processes. The results support Barsalou’s model of perceptual symbol systems ( 1999 ).