Processing Temporal Constraints: An ERP Study

Abstract

This article investigates how linguistic expressions of time—in particular, temporal adverbs and verb tense morphemes—are used to establish temporal reference at the level of brain physiology. First, a formal semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs is outlined. It is argued that computing temporal reference amounts to solving a constraint satisfaction problem. Next, the results of an event‐related potential (ERP) study are presented, which suggest that violations of verb tense (“Last Sunday Vincent paints the window frames of his country house.”) evoke larger left‐anterior negativities (LANs) compared to sentences in which verb tense is correct. The semantic analysis is finally combined with a computational, unification‐based model of parsing to provide a functional account of the ERP data.