Investigating the language of time: Evaluating the use and comprehension of before and after
Abstract
Before-initial sentences are thought to be more difficult to comprehend than after-initial sentences because they structurally mismatch the temporal order of real-world events (Münte et al., 1998). Although event knowledge is known to affect how people understand before/after-initial sentences, little is known about the role of language knowledge in comprehending these sentences. A corpus analysis of before/after-initial sentences revealed that before typically is paired with a pronoun (Before he…) whereas after is paired with verb-ing (After leaving…). Participants' eyes were tracked while they read Before/After-pronoun/verbing sentences. Reading times did not match the corpus statistics. The beginning of verbing-sentences was read faster than pronoun-sentences regardless of whether they began with before or after. Reading times were similar for before- and after-initial sentences. The results suggest that when people read natural sounding sentences, they do not have difficulty with sentences in which the order of events mismatches real world temporal order.