Clock Time Naming: Complexities of a Simple Task

Performance in relative clock time naming (e.g., pronouncing 3:50 as “ten to four”) has been described as depending on three factors: reference hour determination, minute transformation, and an additional distance component (Meeuwissen, Roelofs & Levelt, 2003). However, this model does not specify the cognitive operations that are responsible for the distance effect. We present three hypotheses about the factors that determine clock time latencies: physical distance, arithmetics, and frequency of the expression. Three experiments and a corpus analysis that test these hypotheses are presented. Regression models of speech onset latencies for an extended set of clock times show clear contributions of all three factors and explain most of the variance associated with this task.