{"pk":49611,"title":"Temporal proximity inferences in complex sentence comprehension: Evidence from English complement and relative clauses","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In language comprehension, mental representations of temporal relations between described situations are often construed by inference. While the basis for these inferences remains unclear, growing evidence suggests that abstract predicate properties – such as dynamicity and causal structure – play a crucial role in temporal event construal. Across two self-paced reading experiments, replicating and extending Gennari (2004), we find that temporal proximity inferences are shaped by these properties, but only for stative predicates that generally encode non-dynamic situations without causal structure: Participants consistently expected states to overlap in time, in both complement (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that temporal proximity inferences arise as a general feature of (non)-dynamicity, supporting models of language comprehension that prioritize abstract event structural properties in shaping temporal inferences.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Psychology; Cognition of Time; Language Comprehension; Pragmatics; Semantics of language; Computer-based experiment"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s98p5c4","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Elena","middle_name":"","last_name":"Marx","name_suffix":"","institution":"Central European University","department":""},{"first_name":"Eva","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wittenberg","name_suffix":"","institution":"Central European University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49611/galley/37573/download/"}]}