Perceiving and describing event temporal dynamics

This paper investigates how people coordinate perceiving and describing event temporal dynamics. Participants viewed animations of fish swimming events and described how the events are related in time. We examined the timing when linguistic descriptions were launched, the linguistic characteristics, and the eye movement properties of participants viewing the fish swimming events. The results showed that there are three modes of launching descriptions: (a) some people always launch their descriptions while events are unfolding, (b) some people always launch descriptions after events unfold, and (c) some people switch between launching during and after the events depending on the context. When two events have a higher degree of simultaneity in time, people tend to launch their spontaneous descriptions after the events unfold. The linguistic characteristics of the descriptions, for example, the number of clauses and the number of verbs, reflect some of the interactions between description modes and event temporal properties. People tend to fixate on the end points of the events when they are ready to utter the words “stop ” and “start”