Research On The Influence Of Temporal Overlap And Distance In Representation Of Temporal References During Comprehension Of Subordinate Clauses

By using an on-line window display technique and off-line reading paradigm, I investigated the influence of temporal overlap and distance in the representation of temporal references during comprehension of subordinate clauses with 4 experiments.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 examined state and event subordinate clauses respectively, the results of them showed that subordinate temporal references overlapping with the main cause event or close to the main event are processed faster than non-overlapping references or distance references. In Experiment 3,1 investigated non-subordinate sentences with similar temporal references, as in Experiment 1 and 2, and found on differences in processing time, which indicates that the computation of the temporal relation between subordinate and main event is critical to yield differential processing time. Finally, in Experiment 4,1 investigated whether temporal distance also affects the interpretation of subordinate states, in addition to overlap. There is no distance effect independent of overlap.Overall, the results indicated that the on-line temporal interpretation of state and event clauses are independent modulated by temporal overlap and temporal distance. And the results showed that the temporal and causal contingency relation as well as world knowledge are the main factors which modulated the construction of situation model during sentence comprehension. Studying how these factors interact during sentence comprehension is an important part of understanding how sentence comprehension, even construction of situation model in text works, which can improve he reading speed of reader and his understanding the texts.