The Research On The Relationship Between Mental Load Induced By Syntactic Ambiguity And Duration Estimation

In the daily life, duration estimation is ubiquitous, when people estimate duration, not only they pay attention to the time, and they also carry on other tasks during this period of time. When carry on other tasks, the mental load is a factor must be inspected. This paper explores the relationship between mental load induced by syntactic ambiguity and duration estimation by using syntactic ambiguity (different meaning in the same sentence) and the modification of the syntactic ambiguity (different meaning in two sentences). This research designed two experiments to explore the relationship between mental load and duration estimation in the following two situations by using Chinese syntactic ambiguity to induce mental load and improving the measuring method of mental load,. Experiment 1 explores the relationship between mental load and duration estimation under the syntactic ambiguity situation. Experiment 2 makes an improvement on the basis of Experiment 1, using sentence recognition paradigm to induce higher mental load to explore the relationship during the situation on the modification of the syntactic ambiguity. The results showed that: In the syntactic ambiguity situation, the subsection of the syntactic ambiguity sentences results the events increment of recollection, and thus will cause the duration estimation to be longer with retrospective judgment than with prospective judgment. But when using the prospective judgment, as a result of the attention effect, the attention resources are distributed to two tasks which causes subjects neglecting time passing, thus results the underestimation. But in the none syntactic ambiguity situation, according to attention theory, prospective judgment make subjects hold the attention on the time, which causes the duration estimation to be longer with prospective judgment than with retrospective judgment. At the same time, reading syntactic ambiguity sentence will take on more cognition resources, and will have high mental load, which correlates to the syntactic ambiguity and the estimation paradigm. The mental load correlates to the estimated duration.