Abstract
Spatial metaphors are used to represent and reason about time. Such metaphors are typically arranged along the sagittal axis in most languages. For example, in English, “The future lies ahead of us” and “We look back on our past.” This is less straightforward for Chinese. Specifically, both the past and future can either be behind or ahead. The present study aims to explore these cross-linguistic differences by priming auditory targets (e.g., tomorrow) with either a congruent (i.e., pointing forwards) or incongruent (i.e., pointing backwards) gesture. Two groups of college-age young adult participants (English and Chinese speakers) made temporal classifications of words after watching a gestural prime. If speakers represent time along the sagittal axis, they should respond faster if the auditory target is preceded with a gesture indicating a congruent vs. incongruent spatial location. Results showed that English speakers responded faster to congruent gesture-word pairs than to incongruent pairs, mirroring spatio-temporal metaphors commonly recruited to talk about time in their native language. However, such an effect of congruency was not found for Chinese speakers. These findings suggest that while the spatio-temporal metaphors commonly recruited to talk about time help to structure the mental timelines of English speakers, the varying instances in how time is represented along the sagittal axis in Chinese may lead to a more variable mental timeline as well. In addition, our findings demonstrate that gestures may not only be a means of accessing concrete concepts in the mind, as shown in previous studies, but may be used to access abstract ones as well.
Highlights
The Influence of Metaphors on How Time is Structured in the MindMetaphors that people use to represent abstract concepts in both written and spoken language may determine the structure of the spatial representations that are generated when conceiving such concepts (Casasanto and Boroditsky’s (2008) Integrated Metaphoric Structuring View; Santiago et al.’s (2011) Flexible Foundations theory of Metaphoric Reasoning; Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) Conceptual Metaphor Theory)
Using our cross-modal priming paradigm with temporal gestures as primes and auditory tokens as targets, we found an effect of congruency along the sagittal axis for English speakers, suggesting that it is recruited
The present findings provide support for the view that temporal concepts in the mind reflect spatiotemporal metaphors used to represent time in speech and writing, with time being aligned along the sagittal axis
Summary
The Influence of Metaphors on How Time is Structured in the MindMetaphors that people use to represent abstract concepts in both written and spoken language may determine the structure of the spatial representations that are generated when conceiving such concepts (Casasanto and Boroditsky’s (2008) Integrated Metaphoric Structuring View; Santiago et al.’s (2011) Flexible Foundations theory of Metaphoric Reasoning; Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) Conceptual Metaphor Theory). Speakers may possess a sagittal timeline that extends along their front and back Unlike the previously described conceptualization of time where the individual or “ego” is situated along the timeline, an alternative timeline along the sagittal plane has been proposed where time is conceived as moving from the future to past as though it were a conveyor belt. This is evident in phrases like “The luncheon is after the talk.”. This is evident in phrases like “The luncheon is after the talk.” Note that the individual is missing in such statements, and time is instead conceived of as a sequence of events, where the “front” is assigned to earlier events and the “back” to later events (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002; Gentner et al, 2002)
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