Back (or forward?) to the future: The role of perspective in temporal language comprehension

Linguists have noted that 2 distinct movement perspectives are implicit in English temporal expressions: a ist in which events are stationary relative to a moving observer (the moving-ego perspective) and a 2nd in which events move relative to a stationary observer (the moving-time perspective). Two experiments are reported that investigated the role of these perspectives in temporal language comprehension. Experiment 1 used a paradigm in which the comprehension of a target temporal sentence could potentially be facilitated or disrupted by the perspective implied by prior context. In Experiment 2, prior context was manipulated in a similar fashion in an effort to influence participants' interpretations of ostensibly ambiguous temporal statements. The results of both experiments suggest that people do use perspective information when they encounter moving-ego and moving-time temporal sentences in discourse.