Psychology Commons^™

Event Syntax And Event Semantics As Constraints On Availability Of Discourse, Raymond B. Becker

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The understanding of how temporal information constrains situation models is far from complete. In tehse two experiments participants read short stories, where the antecedent sentence was manipulated with respect to varying tense, grammatical and lexical verb aspect (Experiment 1), and then by varying grammatical and lexical verb aspect in conjunction with long and short duration events (Experiment 2). We used electrophysiological measures time-locked to the anaphoric referent to investigate how the brain responds to these temporal constraints. The purpose was to investigate teh possibility that these variables have an influence on the availability of discourse concepts in situation models. In …