The Effect Of Time Overlapped Relationship On The Activation Of Previous Events In Discourse Reading

Reading is one of the most common human activities, reading psychology is the hot spot of this year’s study, text reading plays an important role in the study of reading psychology. Situation model is the highest level mental representation in the process of discourse reading. In the research of time dimension in the situation model, as a common and important clue, time overlapped relationship has important significance for understanding the theme of discourse and improving reading efficiency.This research studies the role of time overlapped relationship on the activation of previous events in discourse reading by 4 experiments. The materials including time events in four experiments refer to Zwaan’s discourses to design,and all experiments use within design. In Experiment 1, we use the single factor experiment design of 4 levels. We use the moving window technique to present experimental materials and record reading time of the key sentences for studying the effect on the activation of previous events in four conditions. In experiment 2, we use eye movement experiment to study the reason of the differences of reading time in different conditions by recording a series of eye movement indexes in the “time-word” area and “key-event” area. In experiment 3,we use 2(time overlapped condition: overlapped, not overlapped) ×2(time reference: early, late) experiment design. We use the moving window technique to present experimental materials. We use the probe-judgment paradigm to study the roles of the time overlapped condition and time reference on the activation of previous events. In experiment 4, we use the eye movement technique, through recording a series of eye movement indexes of the reference sentences, to investigate the influence of time overlapped condition and reference time on the integration of the information in the discourse.The main conclusions are as the following:(1)Time overlapped condition makes interrupt on the fore-and-aft process but not completely break fore-and-aft scene; process of time overlapped condition is a process between coherent and incoherent.The processing of temporal overlap had both coherent processing characteristics of the short temporal shift and interrupt processing characteristics of long temporal shift.(2) The results showed that when time was not overlapped with this month, sooner the time reference point was, longer the processing time of the anaphoric sentence was, showing the time distance effect. When time was overlapped with this month, sooner the time reference point was, longer the reaction time of the probe word was, showing the time distance effect.(3)This study manifested that the temporal overlap processing had twofold features: analogous temporal shift and analogous temporal distance.