Chinese Learners' Cognition Of English Spatio-Temporal Metaphors

People often talk about time in terms of space:of looking forward to a brighter tomorrow, of troubles that lie behind us. The language of spatial motion also seems to be imported into time, as when people say that the holidays are approaching, or that a theory was proposed ahead of its time. The spatial metaphors used to represent time are defined as the Spatio-temporal metaphors. There are two distinct spatial-temporal metaphoric systems in English and many other languages (Bierwisch,1967; Clark,1973; Traugott,1978):the ego-moving metaphor and the time-moving metaphor.However, different researchers have different opinions about the time-moving metaphors and ego-moving metaphors under the general TIME metaphor. Gentner's (1992) findings supported the Structure Mapping Model that Metaphoric Consistency effect exists in English-inconsistent metaphors results in slower reaction time because shifting conceptual structure requires a cognitive cost. And Gentner also found that people use ego-moving system more often than the time-moving system. While in China, two different points appeared:one is different from Gentner's point that the previous time-moving setting sentences did not cause shorter reaction time in the following test sentences while ego-moving metaphors did and time-moving metaphor is primary over ego-moving metaphor in Mandarin (Lai,2002); the other is consistent with Gentner's point of view that shifting conceptual structure did result in slower reaction time and ego-moving seemed to be easier to process and ego-moving is primary in Mandarin Chinese (Zhou,2001). This paper is intended to investigate into the Chinese learners'cognition of English spatio-temporal metaphors by experiments.This research, using spatio-temporal metaphors, mainly examines subjects'judgment about time in an on-line comprehension task. A Pretest and a Cross Modal Experiment were made to test how the English materials will show for non-English majors in Chinese colleges. All the subjects were divided into 2 groups:the first group in Pretest and the second group in Cross Modal Experiment. They came respectively from 8 classes of Southwest Jiaotong University. First, a Pretest was carried out for the purpose of finding out 3 pairs of time-moving metaphors and 3 pairs of ego-moving metaphors with very similar accuracy and response time, which were used as the test sentences in the following Cross Modal Experiment. At the same time, the mean reaction time and accuracy of each sentence were recorded. Secondly, in order to test the effects of English metaphor consistency, a 2×2 Cross modal experiment has been made to explore whether the setting sentences are consistent or inconsistent will lead to different accuracy and reaction time. At last, with comparing and analyzing the subjects'CET4 scores with their mean reaction time and accuracy, it is trying to explore the relations between Chinese learners'English proficiency and their cognition of spatio-temporal metaphors in English.There are four major findings from the two experiments. Firstly, for Chinese English learners, the ego-moving metaphor is easier to comprehend and is the primary conceptualization of time. Secondly, processing takes longer time in the inconsistent mapping condition than in the consistent condition which accounts for the existence of Metaphoric Consistency effect in Chinese. Thirdly, Chinese learners with high CET4 scores responded more quickly to spatio-temporal metaphors in English together with greater accuracy, which proves Chinese learners'English proficiency really affects their cognition of spatio-temporal metaphors in English. Finally, Chinese students'mother language still influence their way of thinking about time in English.