CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2026
| Author | Elena |
|---|---|
| Title | Inferring Temporal Order in Language Comprehension |
| Summary | How do people order events in their mind when listening to a story? Language often provides explicit hints as to whether something has happened, will happen or happened before or after something else. However, in many cases, the temporal order between linguistically described situations is underspecified and needs to be inferred. This thesis proposes that such inferences are grounded in more general cognitive principles that take event dynamicity – namely, whether situations are inherently static or change over time – as a starting point. Specifically, I propose that comprehenders infer more salient events to happen against the backdrop of less salient states. Four lines of experiments serve to test this proposal experimentally. The first study provides first empirical evidence that temporal interpretation is systematically driven by encoded event dynamicity. Participants reliably matched complex situation descriptions to visual sequences in which described states preceded described events. The second study replicates this pattern of results in three languages in an act-out task, demonstrating that this interpretative preference arises in the absence of visual scaffolding. The third study extends the linguistic context under investigation from complex sentence descriptions to discourse. The fourth study delves deeper into the underlying mechanisms of this temporal inference by using different tenses, thereby testing competing explanations based on linguistic encoding and more general cognitive principles. Overall, this thesis sheds light on the broader question of how event cognition and language interact to form mental representations of temporal relations. Its findings support models of event comprehension that treat event structure, more specifically the presence or absence of dynamic change, as a central organizing principle for understanding temporal structure in language. |
| Supervisor | Wittenberg, Eva; Kovács, Ágnes Melinda |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2026/marx_elena.pdf |
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