Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity:
The case of embedded tense

Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus & Britta Stolterfoht*

Abstract. We report the results of one acceptability rating study and two self-paced
reading studies on the form-meaning mismatch in the interpretation of past-under-past
in complement clauses in English. Across the three experiments, we find an off-line
and on-line preference for the backward-shifted interpretation, in line with predictions
of the structural approach to the ambiguity when assuming a processing preference for
morphological transparent interpretation.
Keywords. tense semantics; consecutio temporum; sequence-of-tense parameter;
form-meaning mismatches; ambiguity; processing strategies; comprehension

1. Introduction. In English, embedded tenses in certain configurations give rise to ambiguities,
most prominently in the case of past tense in a stative complement clause embedded under a past-
marked verb of reported speech. This past-under-past configuration is illustrated in (1). The sen-
tence is compatible with two different direct utterances made by Oliver, indicated in (1-a) and
(1-b), which correspond to a backward-shifted reading (under which Amber’s illness pre-dates
Oliver’s utterance) and a simultaneous reading (under which her illness temporally overlaps with
his utterance). Generalising broadly, structural approaches to this ambiguity treat SIM as derived
from BACK by additional morpho-syntactic technology that allows the lower past tense not to be
interpreted as such (prominently, Ogihara 1989, 1996, Stowell 1996, Kusumoto 1999, 2005).

(1) Oliver said that Amber was sick.
a. Oliver said: “Amber was sick.” (backward-shifted reading, BACK)
b. Oliver said: “Amber is sick.” (simultaneous reading, SIM)

We sketch one possible implementation of such a view in (3), where the lower PAST-operator that
we see in the Logical Form for BACK is deleted to derive SIM, assuming that the use of past-tense
morphology on the embedded verb can also be licensed by the PAST-operator in the matrix clause.
In the absence of such an operator in the embedded clause and in interaction with the semantics of
say in (2), Amber’s illness and Oliver’s utterance are interpreted to share an evaluation time.

(2) For any possible world w ∈ Dw, time t ∈ Di, individual x ∈ De

and tensed proposition p ∈ D⟨s,⟨i,t⟩⟩, J say (simplified) K(w)(t)(p) = 1 if and only if
in all worlds w′ compatible with x’s utterance at t in w, p(w′)(t) = 1.

*This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (Project B1, Tübingen Collaborative
Research Centre 833, ID # 75650358). The research underwent ethical review by the Tübingen Ethics Committee
(reference # 2017 0328 53) and the Proportionate University Ethics Committee at the University of Manchester (ref-
erence #s 2018-5463-7466, 2019-5463-10129). We would like to thank the audience of the 2019 Tübingen “Process-
ing Tense” workshop as well as Petra Augurzky, Núria Barrios-Jurado, Sigrid Beck, Maximilian Berthold, Chen-An
Chang, Lilian Gonzalez Rodriguez, Robin Hörnig, Zahra Kolagar, Alina Mclellan, Anne Mucha, Paul Stott, Rolf
Ulrich, and Malte Zimmermann. Authors: Giuliano Armenate, Universität Potsdam (armenante@uni-potsdam.de),
Vera Hohaus, The University of Manchester (vera.hohaus@manchester.ac.uk) & Britta Stolterfoht, Eberhard Karls
Universität Tübingen (britta.stolterfoht@uni-tuebingen.de).

Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023

c©2023 Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht
Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY license. 1

https://doi.org/10.3765/elm
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(3) a. Logical Form for BACK:
[ PASTt∗ [ λt Oliver sayw@,t [ λw λt′ PASTt′ [ λt′′ Amber sickw,t′′ ] ] ] ],
where t∗ is the utterance time and w@ the actual world

b. Logical Form for SIM:
[ PASTt∗ [ λt Oliver sayw@,t [ λw ————- [ λt′′ Amber sickw,t′′ ] ] ] ]

In this paper, we investigate the processing predictions of this analysis. More generally, under-
standing how the processing system handles this particular ambiguity can also inform our un-
derstanding of the strategies the processing system adopts when there is no one-to-one mapping
between form and meaning and multiple interpretations are available.

2. Previous research. While considered a “touchstone for the adequacy of the semantics for
tense” (von Stechow 2009; 3), embedded tenses have received relatively little attention in the
processing literature. While we find the experimental results in Dickey (2000, 2001)’s landmark
study to be overall inconclusive, they have been taken to point towards a processing preference for
SIM. The data from one of the adult-control groups in Hollebrandse (2000)’s research on first lan-
guage acquisition also suggests a slight acceptability preference for SIM. Gennari (2004) employs
a design that relies on additional manipulations, but also observes an advantage for overlapping
temporal intervals in reading times. Mucha et al. (2022) in their comparison of English and Polish,
however, observe higher acceptability for BACK compared to SIM for both languages.

3. Research questions and experimental hypotheses. When it comes to processing, the struc-
tural approach outlined in the introduction can plausibly be taken to predict a processing prefer-
ence for BACK over SIM, given that an additional operation derives the former from the latter to
allow the past tense morphology in the embedded clause not to be interpreted. More abstractly,
this apparent mismatch between form and meaning is plausibly dispreferred. We translate these
considerations here into the experimental hypothesis H1 in (4).

(4) Hypothesis H1 “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG):
Comprehension is driven by morphological transparency. A past tense should initially always
be interpreted as such, favouring BACK over SIM.

Structurally, however, the resulting Logical Form underlying SIM can also be argued to be simpler
than the structure that derives BACK, which may result in a processing preference for SIM. We
summarise such a view in (5), as our alternative experimental hypothesis H2.

(5) Hypothesis H2 “Representational Simplicity”:
Comprehension is driven by structural simplicity at Logical Form. A past tense in the relevant
configuration should initially not be interpreted, favouring SIM over BACK.

In the next section, we report two sets of experiments designed to test these two hypotheses using
reading times and acceptability judgments. In general, we expect a processing preference to be
reflected in shorter reading times and higher acceptability ratings.

4. Experimental data.

4.1. EXPERIMENTS 1 AND 2. The first two experiments investigated the two hypotheses for the
type of configuration from the introduction, the temporal ambiguous interpretation of a clausal

Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023

Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 2

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complement of a verb of saying with a past-marked, stative predicate. The two experiments share
design and materials, with Experiment 1 a reading-time study and Experiment 2 a rating study,
where a preceding context disambiguated between readings.

Design. Both experiments adopted a 2x2 factorial design, with factors EVALUATION TIME (past
vs future) and intended INTERPRETATION (BACK vs SIM). EVALUATION TIME was manipulated
within the visually presented context; see Figure 1 for an example. The factor INTERPRETATION

relates to the target items presented. A sample item from the two experiments is in (6), where the
vertical bar indicates the presentation segments for Experiment 1.

Figure 1: Sample visual contexts for Experiments 1 and 2

(6) a. Context: Oliver, yesterday: “Amber was sick!” past,BACK
Target: Oliver | said | that | Amber | was | sick.

b. Context: Oliver, yesterday: “Amber is sick!” past,SIM
Target: Oliver | said | that | Amber | was | sick.

c. Context: Oliver, tomorrow: “Amber was sick!” future,BACK
Target: Oliver | will say | that | Amber | was | sick.

d. Context: Oliver, tomorrow: “Amber is sick!” future,#SIM
Target: Oliver | will say | that | Amber | was | sick.

Of particular interest for our research questions are the two past conditions in (6-a) and (6-b),
for which an ambiguous past-under-past sentence is evaluated in a context that establishes BACK
or SIM. Note however also that simultaneous readings are not available when embedding a past-
marked stative predicate under a future-marked verb of saying. As a result (and as indicated by #
above), there is a mismatch between context and target for condition (6-d), which was designed to
act as a control condition.

Predictions. Of the hypotheses formulated earlier, H1 “WYSIWYG” predicts a processing ad-
vantage for BACK, while H2 “Representational Simplicity” predicts an advantage for SIM. For the
first experiment, we expect an effect to arise on the auxiliary or possibly at the spillover region (=
the adjective), since it is at this point that the processor can establish the temporal relation between
the embedded and the matrix clause and align it with the preceding context. (We assume that the
the temporal information retrievable from the context is used for ambiguity resolution; see also,
for instance, Trueswell & Tanenhaus 1991.) Under H1, we expect longer reading times for the
non-transparent past,SIM compared to past,BACK. H2 predicts that the reading times in the criti-
cal region a shorter for the structurally simpler past,SIM, compared to past,BACK. For the second
experiment, H1 predicts higher acceptability ratings for past,BACK compared to past,SIM, while
we expect past,SIM to be rated better than past,BACK under H2.

Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023

Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 3

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4.1.1. METHODS.

Materials. We constructed 48 sets of experimental items like (6), embedded among 40 fillers,
for a total of 88 trials, with each participant being exposed to 12 experimental items per condition.
Each trial comprised a context picture paired with a target sentence. In order to minimize variation
between items, all target sentences followed the rigid template in (7).1

(7) NAME1 said/will say that NAME2 was ADJECTIVE.

Fillers contained reported speech constructions similar to the experimental items but targeting a
different kind of aspectual ambiguity. We also designed 24 comprehension question relating to the
names of the characters involved or the time of the story.

Participants. Participants (N Experiment 1 = 43, N Experiment 2 = 40) were all native speakers of En-
glish. Five participants from the initial 48 were excluded from Experiment 1 because their accu-
racy in answering comprehension questions was below the 75%-threshold. Participants received a
cash reimbursement for their participation.

Procedure. Experiment 1 was a moving-window self-paced reading study, while Experiment 2
was an acceptability rating study. Across experiments, participants first saw the context picture,
followed by the target sentence. This was read word-by-word in the first experiment, while in the
second experiment, participants were asked to rate the sentence based on its fit with the context
picture on a scale from 1 “bad fit” to 6 “good fit”. Of the trials, 3/11 ended with a comprehension
question. Each experimental session started with written instructions, followed by two practice
trials containing relative clauses, and then two blocks of the 88 trials with a break halfway through.
Out of the 88 trials, four lists were formed following a Latin Square design, with stimuli presented
in a randomised fashion. An average session took approximately 30 minutes, with participants
tested individually at the University of Manchester Psycholinguistics Laboratory.

4.1.2. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The data analysis was conducted in the SPSS (Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences) programming environment, performing a repeated-measures anal-
ysis of variance (ANOVA). In our exploratory analyses, we speak of a significant effect only if the
probability of making a Type I error (α error) is below 5%.

Reading times. Reading times were corrected for outliers first, computing only values within
the 90-1,300 ms region. In a second step, reading times with 2.5 standard deviations away from
the mean were excluded. The resulting mean values across all sentence regions are in Figure 2.
Mean reading times for the two regions of interest, the embedded auxiliary and the adjective that
followed it, are listed in Table 1. The results show an effect of EVALUATION TIME for both regions
of interest. At the auxiliary (that is, the embedded was), future attitude reports took significantly
longer to read compared to past ones (F1,42 = 19.5, p < .001, η2 = .318). The same effect was found
at the adjective (F1,42 = 9.6, p < .005, η2 = .186). By contrast, an effect of INTERPRETATION only
reached significance at the adjective, with SIM evoking longer reading times than BACK (F1,42 =
4.4, p < .05, η2 = .096), with no significant interaction between the two factors. Zooming in on the

1If NAME1 was female, then NAME2 name was male, with the number of female and male names kept equal. Only
negative polar adjectives like furious, late, and drunk featured in the stimuli in all three experiments, as they were
deemed to not bias against one reading over the other in the relevant configuration.

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Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 4

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two past conditions, we performed a t-test for EVALUATION TIME = past. While no difference was
found at the auxiliary (t(42) = 1.187, p = .242), the effect approached significance at the adjective
(t(42) = 1.939, p = .059), with BACK associated with faster reading times than SIM.

Figure 2: Mean reading times in ms for Experiment 1, with SAY*= said/will say

Region Condition Mean reading time in ms Standard deviation in ms

Embedded auxiliary

past,BACK
past,SIM
future,BACK
future,SIM

334.4
340.9
354.6
365.9

95.4
105.9
99.1
128.0

Adjective

past,BACK
past,SIM
future,BACK
future,SIM

410.5
430.1
440.9
479.8

111.1
126.7
112.8
200.8

Table 1: Mean reading times for Experiment 1 with standard deviations for regions of interest

Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023

Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 5

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Acceptability ratings. Mean acceptability scores are listed in Table 2.2

past future
BACK 5.98 5.54
SIM 5.38 4.16

Table 2: Mean values of participants’ ratings for Experiment 2
(based on a scale from 1 “bad fit” to 6 “good fit”)

Overall, the future,SIM control condition in Experiment 2 received the lowest (but still relatively
high) ratings, which show that the processor was sensitive to the temporal mismatch in this condi-
tion (despite the lack of a significant interaction in Experiment 1). By contrast, past-under-past was
rated the highest when the intended reading was backward-shifted (in the past,BACK condition),
but the other interpretation (in the past,SIM condition) still averaged a high rating. The statistical
analysis revealed an effect of EVALUATION TIME (F1,47 = 244.9, p < .001, η2 = .839), with future
conditions rated significantly worse than past. Furthermore, we observe an effect of INTERPRETA-
TION, in that participants rated BACK conditions significantly higher than SIM conditions (F1,47 =
107.1, p < .001, η2 = .695). The interaction between EVALUATION TIME and INTERPRETATION

is significant (F1,47 = 65.7, p < .001, η2 = .583), with BACK rated significantly higher than SIM
for future compared to past evaluation times. Upon closer inspection, the difference between the
two interpretations was also significant in the past conditions (t(39) = 4.921, p < .001), pointing
to a preference for the backward-shifted reading.

Discussion. We cautiously take these results to indicate a processing preference for the morpho-
logically transparent, backward-shifted interpretation of past embedded under past in complement
clauses. The results thus lend initial support not only to an analysis of embedded tenses that derives
the simultaneous reading from the backward-shifted reading, but also in favour of a WYSIWYG
processing strategy, as outlined in H1.

One potential challenge for this conclusion relates to a potential priming effect, however:
For past,BACK and future,BACK conditions, both the visual context as well as the target item
contained the same form of the auxiliary to be (that is, was), while SIM conditions involved the
same lemma but different lexemes (that is, is in the visual context and was in the stimulus). We
cannot exclude the possibility that this property of the design may have facilitated the processing
of BACK conditions over SIM conditions. The design of the experiment we present in the next
section sought to address this concern.

4.2. EXPERIMENT 3. We further tested H1 “WYSIWYG” and H2 “Representational Simplicity”
in a third experiment, in a design where the embedded past was locally ambiguous and the intended
interpretation was not already retrievable from the preceding context. The design was intended
to establish whether any processing preferences exists when it comes to BACK and SIM and to
address the methodological concerns raised in the discussion of Experiments 1 and 2. It was
also intended to provide insight into some aspects of how the ambiguity affects the incremental
composition of temporal meaning in these cases.

2Due to a coding error, five experimental items had to be removed from the analysis.

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4.2.1. DESIGN. The experiment tested ambiguous and non-ambiguous past complement clauses
with different continuations, which served as disambiguation in the case of ambiguous past. The
experiment adopted a 2x2 factorial design, with factors AMBIGUITY (+amb vs -amb) and EVENT

(event1 vs event2), where the first event temporally preceded the second, and the second event
coincided with the time at which the matrix verb was interpreted. We will explain the rationale
behind this design in more detail for the sample item in (8), where the rehearsal and the concert
make reference to the two events in question.

(8) a. Context: After last week’s final rehearsal, last night, +amb,event1
John’s band finally gave a concert, where I spoke to him about Mary. . . (= BACK)
Target: John | said | that | Mary | was sick, |
so | that’s why | she | missed | the rehearsal | with | great | regret.

b. Context: After last week’s final rehearsal, last night, +amb,event2
John’s band finally gave a concert, where I spoke to him about Mary. . . (= SIM)
Target: John | said | that | Mary | was sick, |
so | that’s why | she | missed | the concert | with | great | regret.

c. Context: The other day John’s band taped their final rehearsal. -amb,event1
And when this morning I spoke to John about Mary. . .
Target: John | thinks | that | Mary | was sick |
and | that’s why | she | missed | the rehearsal | with | great | regret.

d. Context: The other day John’s band finally gave a concert. -amb,event2
And when this morning I spoke to John about Mary. . .
Target: John | thinks | that | Mary | was sick |
and | that’s why | she | missed | the concert | with | great | regret.

In the +amb conditions, the context was set up in such a way as to introduce both the concert and
the rehearsal that preceded it, and established that John and the speaker had a conversation at the
concert. As a result, the target sentence without the that’s why-continuation in (8-a) and (8-b) is
ambiguous, with the embedded clause plausibly allowing for both BACK and SIM. This ambiguity
is resolved by the rehearsal or the concert in the continuation, with the former only compatible
with BACK and the latter only with SIM. Such an ambiguity does not arise in the -amb conditions,
where the matrix verb is in the present tense; past-under-present embeddings do not allow for
multiple temporal interpretations. The -amb conditions served as baseline conditions that allowed
us to explore the time course of the ambiguity resolution and to control for effects of length and
frequency associated with the nouns used for disambiguation.

Predictions. The design of the experiment was intended to allow us to explore the preferred tem-
poral interpretation of ambiguous past (as reflected in reading times), but also the time course of
ambiguity resolution, that is, when the processing system decided on the temporal interpretation of
the locally ambiguous complement clause. Does the processor delay committing to one of the in-
terpretations as long as possible, in an attempt to avoid a potential revision later down the line? Or
is there a default preference for one reading that will allow for an interpretation to be determined
soon as possible? From these questions, there derive three regions of interest for this experiment,
namely, the embedded predicate (that is, was sick in (8) above), the disambiguating region (the

Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023

Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 7

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https://www.elm-conference.net/


rehearsal or the concert, for instance), and a spillover region, which was defined as the disam-
biguating region +1. Under H1 “WYSIWYG”, we expect an interaction at the disambiguating or
the spillover region, with event2 evoking longer reading times than event1 in the +amb conditions
but not in the -amb conditions. H2 “Representational Simplicity” predicts shorter reading times
for the event2,+amb condition (= SIM), compared to the event1,+amb condition (= BACK). In re-
lation to the incrementality of the composition of the temporal meaning in these sentences, any
such difference could either be a result of the processing system revising a previously assigned in-
terpretation or the result of a dispreferred temporal interpretation that has been delayed but is now
forced by the disambiguation. As for the embedded predicate, if the ambiguity goes unnoticed and
the processing system commits to a temporal interpretation right away (likely, the preferred inter-
pretation), we may not expect an effect of AMBIGUITY. If both interpretations that are available
at this point undergo more active consideration, we expect an increase in reading times for +amb
conditions over -amb conditions.

4.2.2. METHODS.

Materials. 16 experimental items like (8) were constructed alongside 48 fillers, to yield a total of
64 trials. Trials included a context sentence followed by a target sentence. Of the trials, 3/8 ended
with a comprehension question. Disambiguated nouns were carefully paired so that they would
depict events with a stereotypical temporal order (as in the case of a rehearsal and a concert), to
facilitate the retrieval of the intended temporal interpretation. As in the first two experiments, the
target sentences followed a fairly rigid template, with said in all the +amb conditions and thinks
in all the -amb conditions. Filler items exhibited a temporal or an aspectual local ambiguity, with
a disambiguating continuation segment that was either a consecutive sentence similar to the one
used for the experimental items or a relative clause.

Participants. 78 participants, native speakers of English, were recruited via the platform Prolific.
Ten participants were excluded as they scored below 70% in the comprehension task, bringing the
total number of participants to 68. Participants were reimbursed for their participation.

Procedure. The experiment adopted a self-paced reading task, with contexts and targets dis-
played entirely masked on the screen together (see (8) above for the segmentation adopted), but
separated by line breaks. Three practice trials preceded the experimental session, which was split
into four blocks. Participants had the opportunity to take a break at the end of each trial. Four lists
were created following a Latin square design, with stimuli presented in a randomised fashion. An
experimental session took approximately 25 minutes to complete online.

4.2.3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION.

Reading times. Results were analysed as in Experiment 2.3 Reading times were corrected for
outliers, trimming values below 1,200 ms for the context and above 1,500 ms for the disambiguat-
ing region in the continuation. Reading times were then log-transformed, with absolute values
below a standard deviation of 3 from the mean being removed. The reading times computed for
the two regions of interest to the temporal interpretation are reported in Table 3. No effect of AM-
BIGUITY or EVENT was found at the disambiguating region. Although not reaching significance

3Due to a programming error, two items had to be removed from the analysis.

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Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
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(F1,67 = 3.127, p = .082, η2 = .045), we found a trend towards an interaction, with faster reading
times for event1 (= the backward-shifted interpretation) than event2 (= the simultaneous interpre-
tation) in the +amb condition compared to the -amb baseline; see also Figure 3. No effect was
observed at the spillover region (F1,67 = .729, p = .396, η2 = .011). Lastly, there was no effect of
AMBIGUITY at the embedded predicate region (for the example in (8), was sick). There is thus
no evidence that locally ambiguous sentences slowed down the processing system at the first point
where it would have been possible to assign a temporal interpretation to the sentence and where
the temporal ambiguity would have been detectable.

Region AMBIGUITY EVENT Mean

Disambiguation
+amb

-amb

event1 (= BACK)
event2 (= SIM)
event1
event2

5.878
5.928
5.922
5.869

Spillover
+amb

-amb

event1 (= BACK)
event2 (= SIM)
event1
event2

5.991
5.990
5.973
5.929

Table 3: Log-transformed mean reading times for regions of interests

Figure 3: Reading times of participants for Experiment 3 at the disambiguating region

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Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
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Discussion. Overall, these findings are compatible with the results from the previous two experi-
ments and with a general processing preference for backward-shifted interpretations over simulta-
neous ones, in line with H1 “WYSIWYG”. In relation to the on-line composition of the temporal
interpretation, in the absence of an effect at the embedded predicate, it appears that the ambigu-
ity did not slow down the processing system. It is plausible that the preferred interpretation was
assigned as soon as possible and later revised if incompatible with the continuation.

Before we turn to the overall discussion, let us briefly comment on the lack of a significant
interaction between AMBIGUITY and EVENT in this experiment, especially given the trend ob-
served in the data. One possible explanation for this may be design-related, the other may be
related to more general cognitive principles: In relation to the design, the sample size was likely
not large enough to produce sufficient statistical power, given the small effect size (η2 = .45) and
the challenge of constructing a higher number of good stimuli with the adopted design. From a
cognition perspective, it has been observed that temporal remoteness is harder to process than tem-
poral proximity, in that events that are temporally distant come with a processing cost compared
to those closer to the speech time (see, for instance, Gennari 2004). BACK involves an event that
is temporally further away from both the utterance time to which the sentence is anchored and
the time at which the matrix predicate is interpreted than the event involved in SIM (that is, the
rehearsal precedes the concert precedes the utterance time in the example item). Since the events
features prominently in the items, we may want to speculate that this cognitive bias was a con-
founding effect and curbed the magnitude of the expected interaction. A second, related confound
might also have played an inhibiting role: More recently mentioned referents are easier to recover,
and thus to process. Within the design of Experiment 3, these were by choice always noun phrases
that would force SIM. We opted against presenting the two events in a non-chronological order in
the context for half of the trials to preserve naturalness and readability of the stimuli.

5. Overall discussion. Taken together, the three studies presented here provide initial evidence for
an on- and off-line preference for BACK over SIM in the interpretation of ambiguous past-under-
past. Taken together, we cautiously take these results to provide support for H1 “WYSIWYG” and
a processing strategy that favours morphological transparency over structural simplicity to resolve
form-meaning mismatches. These results challenge the often implicitly assumed preference for
SIM, but are in line with more recent findings in Mucha et al. (2022). Based on our findings in
Experiment 3, we have tentatively suggested that BACK may constitute a default interpretative
strategy during on-line comprehension and that the ambiguous past in complement clauses does
not cause the processing system to delay the composition of the temporal meaning of the sentence.
These are preliminary findings, however, which should be investigated further in an adequately
controlled experimental setting.

While a preference for BACK is not compatible with H2 “Representational Simplicity” as
discussed in Section 3, the structurally simpler Logical Form for SIM may not necessarily translate
to a processing advantage over BACK if we discuss the two structural representations as a type
of filler-gap constellation, with the embedded tense operator a filler and the temporal variable
associated with the embedded predicate the gap. Processing difficulty in filler-gap constellations
is often measured in terms of the linear or structural distance between the filler and the gap, with

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Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 10

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increased distance in a dependency increasing processing load.4 Assuming for the Logical Form
underlying SIM a reduced structure as in (3), which lacks a tense operator (that is, filler) in the
embedded clause, the temporal variable (that is, the gap) associated with the embedded predicate
will be bound by the matrix predicate (and in turn the matrix PAST), leading to a non-local chain.
By contrast, the Logical Form underlying BACK is characterised by a local chain, which in return
should translate into a processing advantage for BACK over SIM. Given these considerations, no
preference would be expected for SIM, even under a processing hypothesis based on the structural
representations underlying the different readings.

6. Conclusion. This paper investigated the processing of a prominent form-meaning mismatch in
English that relates to the temporal interpretation of sentence. More specifically, we investigated
the processing of past-tensed complement clauses embedded under a past-marked verb of saying/
attitude verb, which allow for both simultaneous and backward-shifted interpretations. Overall, the
results provide preliminary evidence in favour of a preference for BACK in both reading and rat-
ing tasks that prevents a processing delay in composing temporal meaning in these cases. We took
these findings to provide empirical support for a processing strategy that hinges on a transparent
mapping of morphological form to meaning where, by WYSIWYG, past morphology by default
translates to past meaning. In the light of these results, we reasoned that competing hypotheses
built on structural simplicity may have to be revised, as the reduced temporal representations un-
derlying SIM come at the cost of a potential processing difficulty associated with their non-local
filler-gap dependencies.

Beyond these findings, we hope that this paper will raise awareness for what we consider an
under-researched area in semantic processing and highlight some of the methodological questions
in researching the processing of embedded tense. Directions for further research not only include
addressing some of these methodological challenges with different designs, but also broadening
the empirical footing of the research programme to include the processing of progressive-marked
past predicates, which also give rise to BACK and SIM (see, for instance, Kusumoto 1999), and
a wider array of embedded environments, including relative clauses and adjunct clauses. Relative
clauses in particular are compatible with a wider range of temporal configurations than comple-
ment clauses, without exhibiting structural ambiguity (see, for instance, Kusumoto 2005, Hohaus
2019). Processing data from a wider range of languages would also be welcome in future research,
especially given the range of well-documented cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of
embedded tenses (see, for instance, Grønn & von Stechow 2010, Bochnak et al. 2019).

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Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023

Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 11

https://doi.org/10.3765/elm
https://www.elm-conference.net/


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Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023

Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht:
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense. 12

https://doi.org/10.3765/elm
https://www.elm-conference.net/