The Influence Of Temporal Connectives Before And After On Pragmatic Processing

Temporal connective plays a crucial role in marking the sequence of events during discourse comprehension.Existing studies have shown that temporal information coherence can be modulated by temporal connectives like before and after,and put forward different theories.Veridicality and iconicity in the semantic accounts believe that before is more difficult to process than after while polarity and frequency-based account believe that after is more difficult to process than before.Moreover,crosscultural accounts believe that English and Chinese speakers may have different temporal interpretations.English speakers are more inclined to use ego-moving metaphors while Chinese speakers are more inclined to use time-moving metaphors.Therefore,there is no conclusive consensus on whether before is more difficult to process than after or not.Furthermore,these theories have mainly focused on languages with grammatical tense like English.It thus remains unclear how temporal information is processed in tenseless languages like Chinese.The present study used event-related potentials(ERPs)to examine how pragmatic information/world knowledge is retrieved and integrated in sentences linked by zhiqian(before)and zhihou(after)in Mandarin Chinese.In this study,the critical words(e.g.fresh)were as either congruent or incongruent with one's world knowledge(e.g.,After/Before going to the city,Grandpa went to the countryside because the air there was fresh and pure).The result showed,relative to the after-congruent sentences,the after-incongruent sentences evoked a P600 on critical words and a negativity on sentence-final words,whereas relative to before-congruent sentences,before-incongruent sentences showed no significant difference on critical words but a sustained negativity on sentence-final words.As for the congruent condition,before-congruent sentences elicited a larger sustained positivity(P600)than after-congruent sentences,and the P600 difference was positively correlated with individual's Autism-Spectrum Quotient(AQ)-imagination score.In addition,individual's working memory span has a significant positive correlation with the ERP difference between before and after at the connective position.The results suggest that sentence-medial before is more difficult to process than sentence-medial after in Mandarin Chinese,supporting the iconicity and veridicality accounts of temporal relations.Compared with after sentences,before sentences require readers to afford more cognition cost to repair presumed iconic and veridical occurrence in the predicted situation model based on the context.Also,the findings may support the cross-cultural account,that is,culture affects the recognition of temporal connectives implicitly as Chinese speakers need more imagination resources to establish the situation model in order to adapt the ego-moving metaphors.