How Features of Contextual Events Alter the Interpretations of Before and After

Various aspects of linguistic context affect how we interpret words within discourse. We systematically assessed the influence of contextual events on temporal prepositions (before, after) by asking participants to estimate the duration of events and the duration that passed between these events. In four experiments, we varied the durations of the events, the sentence structure, and the semantic relation between the events. We found that there is a strong relationship between the durations of events and the estimates of time that passed between them, corresponding to before and after. The event duration with the strongest influence on these estimates was often based on their temporal sequence, and only based on their role in the sentence in a few specific cases. This demonstrates a strong role of time in these interpretations, which is different from other influences of context on terms.