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摘要
Previous research has Suggested that language comprehension routinely involves dynamic mental representations. Mental representations of temporal information about successive events stored in memory were investigated. Three experiments were conducted using a sentence-probe-recognition task in which the sentence events and the probe events were designed to reflect either a chronological time orientation or a reversed time orientation. The implicit time shift between events also was manipulated. Chronological events were more accessible than the reversed-time events, even for events involving a scenario shift. However, when the sentence events and the probe events differed by level within a hierarchical structure, the effect of temporal orientation disappeared. The results suggest that readers continue to track mentally an event's temporal structure and anticipate the upcoming event in a dynamic representation until another event emerges on a different level within a hierarchical structure.
