DYNAMIC MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

Previous research has Suggested that language comprehension routinely involves dynamic mental representations. Mental representations of temporal information about successive events stored in memory were investigated. Three experiments were conducted using a sentence-probe-recognition task in which the sentence events and the probe events were designed to reflect either a chronological time orientation or a reversed time orientation. The implicit time shift between events also was manipulated. Chronological events were more accessible than the reversed-time events, even for events involving a scenario shift. However, when the sentence events and the probe events differed by level within a hierarchical structure, the effect of temporal orientation disappeared. The results suggest that readers continue to track mentally an event's temporal structure and anticipate the upcoming event in a dynamic representation until another event emerges on a different level within a hierarchical structure.