Imagine hearing a sentence such as “the chicken landed on the basket next to which the girl sat”. Did the girl sit next to the basket before or after the chicken landed on it? Syntax-based theories - that is, theories that look at how words are combined into larger units such as sentences - suggest that both temporal orders are possible. Pragmatic accounts, which examine how context and the relationship between speaker and hearer affect language comprehension, suggest that relative clauses such as "next to which the girl is standing" provide the background against which main clauses such as "the chicken landed on the basket" are interpreted. Finally, accounts based on event cognition argue that the internal structure of the two events predicts which temporal order will be constructed during language comprehension: static, time-homogeneous situations such as "sitting" are less salient than dynamic changes-of-state such as "landing", and should therefore serve as backgrounds against which changes unfold.

In our study, we test these different predictions: Participants use Playmobil toys to reenact sentences, like the example above, with events that differ in their internal structure.