Mental Representations of Persian and English Absolute and Relative Tenses: A Contrastive-Psycholinguistic Approach

AbstractThe main issue addressed in the present study was the psycholinguistic reality of representational complexities of tenses in Persian compared to English language. The cross-modal lexical decision method was used to examine relative tense processing during sentence processing. The theoretical frameworks applied here were those of Comrie (1985) and Shapiro (1990) dealt with linguistically and psycholinguistically, respectively. The dependent and independent variables were the participants’ reaction times and the type of tense, respectively. 25 university students aged 18-30 years were selected based on some specific factors like gender and university grade. The results of the 1st experiment showed that simple sentences, including factual scientific present and future tense verbs, as well as performatives, were processed faster than those containing other tenses. This was the result of either common experiences of human beings or instantaneous verbs uttered by them. The results of the 2nd experiment revealed that simple sentences containing non-finite relative tense verbs were processed slower than those having other tenses like present perfect, past perfect, and subjunctives. This might be related to the un-markedness of non-finites. What was common in these two experiments was that converting simple sentences into complex ones would erase the significant differences in the participants’ times of reaction to the simple sentences. The findings of this research demonstrated that cognitive load could be used in the curriculum design for non-native learners of Persian language so that learning the tenses that needed a much more cognitive load could be postponed in the learning process. Key words: reaction time, listening comprehension, representational complexity, cognitive load, absolute and relative tenses IntroductionDifferent linguists have proposed varied definitions for tense. This study investigated processing of sentences containing different tenses of Persian language via the cross-modal lexical decision method. This psycholinguistic approach was classically taken by Shapiro and Levine (1990) to estimate cognitive load across the mind. The main issue of this research was the psycholinguistic reality of the hierarchical complexities of tenses arranged from absolute to relative ones. The theoretical framework was mainly based on episodic processing, in which the mental representations of linguistic items were not as abstract as they seemed, but th