The Role of Event Boundaries in Language: Perceiving and Describing the Sequence of Simultaneous Events

Abstract

Studies in event perception have shown that people impose boundaries onto the constant flux of perceptual information and perceive the world to be composed of a series of discrete events. A significant question arises to whether humans impose boundaries onto events that unfold along multiple tracks and perceive them to be one psychological entity (i.e., temporal chunking). The traditional method of event segmentation has difficulties with investigating simultaneous events. The current study investigated whether and how talking about events reveals the psychological event boundaries imposed by perceivers. The current study manipulated the temporal parameters of stimulus events, controlled the causality of events, and thus translated the linguistic differences into measurable properties of events. Participants viewed films of simultaneous events, and performed linguistic acceptability judgments. The results showed there is a correspondence between how people talk about the event sequence and the order in which events occur following event segmentations.