The Perception Of Time: From Psychology To Psycholinguistics

Research on time perception born aiming at understanding the mechanisms underlying chronobiology, the estimation of subjective time and the temporal coordination of some motor responses. The progress made by the discipline raised an information processing model that explains the cognitive mechanisms involved in the psychological time. Linguistic research also deals with some time-related phenomena, such as aspectual coercion. Coercion occurs when a punctual verb is inserted into durative contexts, forcing an iterative reading of the event [the child sneezed all the day long]. Only recently the concepts of subjective time reached the research on language and expanded the predictions of some linguistic phenomena. The present paper consists of a brief review of the main concepts on time perception, aiming at stablishing a relation between the psychology of time and the psycholinguistics of aspectual coercion.51337438