The ability to think about nonpresent time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now." They also intrinsically differ: The past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or differently? In this study, we addressed this question by investigating how Spanish speakers process past/future time reference violations during sentence processing, while recording eye movements. We also investigated the role of verbs (in isolation; within sentences) and adverbs (deictic; nondeictic) during time processing. Existing accounts propose that past processing, which requires a link to discourse, is more complex than future processing, which-like the present-is locally bound. Our findings show that past and future processing differs, especially at early stages of verb processing, but this difference is not limited to the presence/absence of discourse linking. We found earlier mismatch effects for past compared to future time reference in incongruous sentences, in line with previous studies. Interestingly, it took longer to categorize the past than the future tense when verbs were presented in isolation. However, it took longer to categorize the future than the past when verbs were presented in congruous sentences, arguably because the future implies alterable worlds. Finally, temporal adverbs were found to play an important role in reinspection and reanalysis triggered by the presence of undefined time frames (nondeictic adverbs) or incongruences (mismatching verbs). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Double dissociations were long considered a gold standard for establishing functional modularity. However, Plaut (1995) demonstrated that double dissociations could result without underlying modularity. He damaged attractor networks with separate orthographic and semantic layers (as well as a hid- den layer with feedback connections from semantics) that were trained to map orthography to semantics. Damaging con- nections coming from either the orthographic layer or recur- rent semantic connections (to and from cleanup units) could both yield double dissociations, with some models exhibit- ing greater relative deficits for abstract words, and others for concrete words. We investigated whether double dissocia- tions would emerge in a simpler attractor network with 2 sets of units (orthographic and semantic) and 2 layers of connec- tions (orthographic-to-semantic and recurrent semantic con- nections). Random damage to orthographic-semantic con- nections yielded double dissocations (some damaged mod- els showed stronger relative deficits for abstract words, while others showed stronger relative deficits for concrete words). Semantic-semantic damage led only to concrete deficits. The presence of double dissociations given different degrees of damage in each model reconfirm Plaut's (1995) findings in simpler, “flat” attractor network (O'Connor, Cree, & McRae, 2009), with less potential for modularity. The tendency for concrete impairments given damage to the semantic attractor level is at once surprising and revealing; it demonstrates a di- vision of labor (and partial modularity) that emerges in this network. We will discuss theoretical implications, as well as next steps in this research program.

Existing psycholinguistic models typically describe agreement relations as monolithic phenomena amounting to mechanisms that check mere feature consistency. This eye-tracking study aimed at widening this perspective by investigating the time spent reading subject-verb (number, person) and adverb-verb (tense) violations on an inflected verb during sentence comprehension in Spanish. Results suggest that (i) distinct processing mechanisms underlie the analysis of subject-verb and adverb-verb relations, (ii) the parser is sensitive to the different interpretive properties that characterise the person, number and tense features encoded in the verb (i.e. anchoring to discourse for person and tense interpretation, as opposed to anchoring to cardinality information for number), and (iii) the (local, distal) position of the agreement controller with respect to the verb affects the interpretation of these dependencies. An account is proposed that capitalises on the importance of enriching current sentence processing formalizations using a feature and relation-based approach.