The Influence Of Temporal Indicators On Counterfactual Language Comprehension In Chinese Conditional Sentences

Counterfactual language comprehension referred that contradicts objective reality or subjective reality(Jiang,2000: 257;Yong,2014: 59).In terms of the many influential factors affecting the understanding of counterfactual conditional sentences,temporal indicators were considered to be the most basic means of expressing counterfactual meaning in Chinese counterfactual conditional sentences,such as “zuó tiān”(yesterday),“dāng shí”(at that time),“nà shí”(then),“ dāng chū”(in the first place),etc(Li & Thompson,1988).Empirical studies on Indo-European languages showed two linguistic factors underlying the understanding of conditional sentences: temporal distance(the distance of past or future time about the present time)and temporal sequence(the relative sequence of the events described in the conditional clause and those in the result clause).However,the significant difference between Chinese and Indo-European languages was that Chinese counterfactuals had no grammatical markers.Therefore,the language comprehension of Chinese counterfactuals relied more on linguistic components such as temporal indicators.Experiment 1 manipulated the temporal distance(long vs.short)and temporal sequence(chronological vs.inverse chronological)between the temporal indicators of the conditional clause and the result clause in the Chinese counterfactual conditionals through the event-related potential technique(N=40).This study used a rapid visual presentation paradigm for the presentation of the experimental material.The results of the experiment 1 clearly showed that subjects required more cognitive processing load in the reverse chronological condition compared to chronological condition,which performed as larger negative waves in the 300-500 ms time window(N400)and larger positive waves in the 500-800 ms time window(P600).Meanwhile,the main effect of temporal distance was insignificant,and the interaction effect of temporal distance and temporal sequence was significant only in the time window of P600 with temporal indicators as keywords.According to the event model theory proposed by Zack,changes in the temporal information could bring updates to the event model(Zacks et al.,2007;2009).To further investigate whether the subjects’ insignificant perception of temporal distance changes during semantic comprehension in Experiment 1 was due to the influence of the event itself,the Experiment 2 used the same experimental procedure and experimental task as Experiment 1(N=40)by manipulating temporal distance changes(long vs.short)and different event difficulty levels(high difficulty vs.low difficulty).The results of Experiment 2 revealed that subjects in the high difficulty condition produced greater cognitive load in the short-distance condition compared to the longdistance condition,such as greater positive waves in the P200 time window and larger negative waves in the N400 time window.It was also found that in the short-distance condition,subjects had more difficulty in counterfactual language comprehension for the condition with high event difficulty compared to the condition with low event difficulty,such as producing a larger negative wave in the time window of N400.The results of the two studies illustrated that in the counterfactual language comprehension,if the temporal sequence between the temporal indicators of the conditional and result clauses conformed to the event model,the process of subjects’ counterfactual language comprehension would accelerate.Meantime,the counterfactual language comprehension of temporal distance could be influenced by the event itself described in the conditionals.In more difficult events,participants would accelerate the cognitive process of language comprehension for the condition of long temporal distance.In contrasts,subjects accelerate the extraction process of language comprehension for the condition of short temporal distance in low difficulty events.The present study may provide some evidence for the effect of temporal factors on the language comprehension of counterfactual sentences,but at the same time,the syntactic structure of the Chinese counterfactual sentences selected in the present study is still relatively homogeneous,and there is a lack of comparison between Chinese counterfactual sentences and Indo-European counterfactual sentences in terms of the cognitive processing of temporal indicators on the semantic understanding of conditional sentences,which can be further explored in subsequent related studies.