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The present study is a replication of Sell & Kaschak's (2011) Experiment 1 (Movement Condition). The original stimulus material (short texts compromising three sentences) was translated from English into German. We successfully replicated the basic congruency effect of the original study, that is, the interaction effect between direction of manual response and time reference when participants perform a sensicality judgment. In contrast to the original study, this congruency effect was not significantly modulated by the magnitude of time shift. Nevertheless, when the congruency effect was evaluated separately for large and small time shifts, it was significant for large but not for small time shifts. In sum, this replication reinforces the basic conclusion by Sell and Kaschak that the timeline becomes automatically activated when processing temporal sentence information, especially when the time shift is large.

Underspecification and coercion are two prominent interpretive mechanisms to account for meaning variability beyond compositionality. While there is plentiful evidence that natural language meaning constitution exploits both mechanisms, it is an open issue whether a concrete phenomenon of meaning variability is an instance of underspecification or coercion. This paper argues that this theoretical dispute can be settled experimentally. The test case are standard motion verbs (e.g. "walk," "ride") in combination with ±telic directional phrases, for which both underspecifaction and coercion analyses have been proposed in the literature. A self-paced reading study which incorporates motion verbs, directional phrases and durative/completive temporal adverbials (1) aims at determining the aspectual value of such verbs, and (2) compares the hypotheses of the Underspecification and Coercion Accounts. The results of the reading time experiment (flanked by a corpus study and a completion study) indicate that motion verbs are aspectually underspecified. They combine with ±telic directional phrases with equal ease. The combination with a mismatching temporal adverbial is an instance of coercion, causing additional processing costs.

Different lines of research suggest that our mental representations of time and space are linked, though the strength of this linkage has only recently been addressed for the front-back mental timeline (Eikmeier, Schröter, Maienborn, Alex-Ruf, & Ulrich, 2013). The present study extends this investigation to the left-right mental timeline. In contrast to what was found in the cited previous study, the obtained space-time congruency effects were smaller than benchmark stimulus-response congruency effects in control conditions. This pattern of results suggests that the representations of time and space are less strongly linked for the left-right axis than for the back-front axis.

The metaphoric mapping theory suggests that abstract concepts, like time, are represented in terms of concrete dimensions such as space. This theory receives support from several lines of research ranging from psychophysics to linguistics and cultural studies; especially strong support comes from recent response time studies. These studies have reported congruency effects between the dimensions of time and space indicating that time evokes spatial representations that may facilitate or impede responses to words with a temporal connotation. The present paper reports the results of three linguistic experiments that examined this congruency effect when participants processed past- and future-related sentences. Response time was shorter when past-related sentences required a left-hand response and future-related sentences a right-hand response than when this mapping of time onto response hand was reversed (Experiment 1). This result suggests that participants can form time-space associations during the processing of sentences and thus this result is consistent with the view that time is mentally represented from left to right. The activation of these time-space associations, however, appears to be non-automatic as shown by the results of Experiments 2 and 3 when participants were asked to perform a non-temporal meaning discrimination task. (Contains 4 tables and 3 figures.)

In two experiments using the action-sentence-compatibility paradigm we investigated the simulation processes that readers undertake when processing state descriptions with adjectives (e.g., "Die Schublade ist offen/zu". ["The drawer is open/shut"]) or adjectival passives (e.g., "Die Schublade ist geoffnet/geschlossen". ["The drawer is opened/closed"]). In Experiment 1 we did not find evidence for action simulation, not even in sentences with adjectival passives. The results were different in Experiment 2, where the temporal particle "noch" ("still/yet") was inserted into the sentences (e.g., "The drawer is still closed"). Under these circumstances readers mentally simulated the action that brought about the current state for sentences with adjectival passives, but the action that would change the current state for sentences with adjectives. Thus, comprehenders are in principle sensitive to the subtle differences between adjectives and adjectival passives but highlighting the temporal dimension of the described states of affairs seems a necessary precondition for obtaining evidence for action simulation with sentences that describe a state. We discuss implications for future studies employing neuro-psychological methods. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)