BACK (OR FORWARD) TO THE FUTURE - THE ROLE OF PERSPECTIVE IN TEMPORALLANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

Linguists have noted that 2 distinct movement perspectives are implici t in English temporal expressions: a ist in which events are stationar y relative to a moving observer (the moving-ego perspective) and a 2nd in which events move relative to a stationary observer (the moving-ti me perspective). Two experiments are reported that investigated the ro le of these perspectives in temporal language comprehension. Experimen t 1 used a paradigm in which the comprehension of a target temporal se ntence could potentially be facilitated or disrupted by the perspectiv e implied by prior context. In Experiment 2, prior context was manipul ated in a similar fashion in an effort to influence participants' inte rpretations of ostensibly ambiguous temporal statements. The results o f both experiments suggest that people do use perspective information when they encounter moving-ego and moving-time temporal sentences in d iscourse.