Arts and Humanities Department, Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Tibidabo Avenue, 39-43, 08035 Barcelona, Spain.
Cogn Psychol. 2011 Feb;62(1):41-79. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.09.002.
This work investigates how we process and represent event duration in on-line language comprehension. Specifically, it examines how events of different duration are processed and what type of knowledge underlies their representations. Studies 1-4 examined verbs and phrases in different contexts. They showed that durative events took longer to process than non-durative events and that the duration attributed to the stimulus events correlated with on-line processing times. Studies 5 and 6 indicated that durative events occur in semantically more diverse contexts and elicit semantically more diverse associations than non-durative events. Semantic and contextual diversity also correlated with attributed durations and processing times. Results indicate that (a) event-specific durations are computed on-line from multiple unfolding cues, (b) processing cost and duration representations emerge from semantic and contextual diversity reflecting our experience, and (c) key components of duration representations may be situation-specific knowledge of causal and contingency relations between events.
这项工作研究了我们如何在线语言理解中处理和表示事件持续时间。具体来说，它考察了不同持续时间的事件是如何被处理的，以及它们的表示背后是哪种类型的知识。研究 1-4 考察了不同语境下的动词和短语。结果表明，持续事件的处理时间比非持续事件长，并且刺激事件所赋予的持续时间与在线处理时间相关。研究 5 和 6 表明，持续事件出现在语义上更加多样的语境中，并引发比非持续事件更具语义多样性的联想。语义和语境多样性也与归因的持续时间和处理时间相关。结果表明：（a）事件特定的持续时间是从多个展开线索在线计算的；（b）处理成本和持续时间的表示来自于反映我们经验的语义和语境多样性；（c）持续时间表示的关键组成部分可能是事件之间因果和偶然关系的特定于情境的知识。
