Comparison Of Spatiotemporal Metaphorical Perspectives Across The Two Languages Of Chinese EFL Learners

Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but also a fundamental aspect of human cognition and thought.One of the most basic metaphors is the spatiotemporal metaphor.Time is an abstract concept that is difficult to process.In contrast,the concept of space is more concrete.Therefore,people often describe time through space,for example,“Spring is ahead.” From the perspective of conceptual metaphor,the “front”and “back” of the time concept are the result of the projection of the spatial domain into the temporal domain.Recent research on spatiotemporal metaphors has demonstrated that there are two spatiotemporal metaphorical perspectives in many languages:time-moving and ego-moving.However,while most existing studies have examined the spatiotemporal perspective preference of the native language,the effect of the foreign language on the spatiotemporal metaphorical perspective remains to be explored.Thus,the current study used a semantic judgment task to examine whether Chinese EFL learners’ two languages affect their processing of spatiotemporal metaphorical perspectives.Specifically,two questions are addressed:(1)Can spatiotemporal metaphorical perspectives shift explicitly in sentence meaning processing?(2)How do Chinese EFL learners’ spatiotemporal metaphorical perspectives differ across the two languages?To address the above questions,forty-one Chinese EFL learners were recruited for this study,in which their processing speed and accuracy of different spatiotemporal metaphorical sentences in both native and foreign languages were compared with a metaphor priming paradigm.Each trial consists of two parts: a prime sentence and a target sentence.The participants were required to judge whether the meaning of the target sentence presented on the screen was correct or not.The experiment is a within-subjects design and involves three independent variables: language(Chinese vs.English),metaphorical perspective(time-moving vs.ego-moving),and perspective congruency(congruent vs.incongruent).Participants’ reaction times and accuracy were recorded as the indexes of dependent variables.The whole test procedure was based on a self-written E-Prime program.Repeated-measures ANOVA results showed a significant main effect of language,with considerably slower reaction times in the English condition as the cognitive load of language processing increased for the subjects.No significant main effect was found for either metaphorical perspective or perspective congruency,indicating that the psychological reality of metaphorical perspective is rather implicit and insensitive when participants make judgmental responses.The interaction between language and metaphorical perspective was significant,i.e.,ego-moving perspective target sentences were judged faster than time-moving in Chinese,whereas time-moving perspective target sentences were judged faster than ego-moving in English.This indicates a foreign language effect as the subjects showed significant self-bias in Chinese,whereas this effect diminished in English.Thus,it resulted in participants’ tendency toward a time-moving perspective under English conditions.The present study provides new empirical evidence for Chinese EFL learners’ spatiotemporal metaphorical perspective preference.What’s more,it further reveals an interaction between the spatiotemporal metaphorical perspective and the foreign language effect,providing a new perspective and direction for future research in this field.