McDaniel and Bugg (2008) proposed that relatively uncommon stimuli and encoding tasks encourage elaborative encoding of individual items (item-specific processing), whereas relatively typical or common encoding tasks encourage encoding of associations among list items (relational processing). It is this relational processing that is thought to…

This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time--for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about…

In his article, Chris Burt focuses on the relationship between time and autobiographical memory. The question Burt puts forward is whether temporal markers in reports on autobiographic memories reflect specific temporal information or result from rather complex cognitive processing of time-relevant knowledge. The aspect of time is inherent to the…

McCormack and Hoerl's state of the art review of the development of temporal concepts from the end of infancy to the end of the fifth year shows that young children's conception of time is quite different from that of adults. Adults and 5-year-old children can construe an event from a range of temporal perspectives and can describe it from a…

Three experiments examined the effects of temporal attention and aging on masked repetition and categorical priming for numbers and words. Participants' temporal attention was manipulated by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., constant or variable SOA). In Experiment 1, participants performed a parity judgment task and a lexical decision…

Studies the perceptual relationship between temporal "before" and "after" and their spatial counterparts. Adults reported temporal "before" related to spatial "after" and temporal "after" related to spatial "before." Three-year old children better understood spatial "after" and spatial "before," suggesting a temporal/spatial semantic acquisition…

Investigation of two- to four-year-olds' (N=20) understanding of temporal terms indicated that children were more likely to understand sentences using simple tasks, materials, and commands than more complicated sentences used in previous research. (Author/CB)

Every sentence conveys a temporal point of view through its aspectual meaning. This viewpoint arises through presenting a situation from a certain temporal perspective and indirectly classifying the situation as an exemplar of an idealized situation type. The information is conveyed by the aspectual categories of a language. This paper presents a…

Stories were constructed in which minor variations in content influenced the relationship existing between statements. The stories had four episodes, which were either logically related or independent. First and third graders could more accurately recall the structure of the logically organized episodes than that of the temporally listed episodes.…

In the first section a sketch of a tense logic is presented and a mechanism is suggested for including aspects of the tense logic into the Grammar (theory of language). Specifically, several grammatical structures are shown to incorporate temporal features. A semantic projection mechanism is utilized to amalgamate the temporal features in elements…

This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the development of the use and understanding of locative and temporal prepositions in 94 children aged from 18 months to 8 years. The research was carried out as part of the Project "Language Development in Pre-School Children," directed by Gordon Wells, at the University of…