The Psychological Reality Of The "Time Is Space" Conceptual Metaphor

Space is an important dimension of time metaphors. Studies have shown that people not only use spatial terms talking about time, but also use spatial structures to understand and construct time. Recently, a new cross-cultural research showed that the native English speakers and native Chinese ones consider time differently. Then, do Chinese speakers use different spatial representation to think about time? In fact, there is no consensus in the early findings about native Chinese speakers. And other conclusions from linguistic analysis lacked of experimental support. What spatial representation do Chinese speakers apply to construct time? How about the specific space-time metaphors mode? Is there any metaphor system preferable by Chinese people? These issues are still in the air.Three experiments were designed and conducted in order to test the psychological reality of Chinese speakers'time representation and provide experimental evidence for further cross-cultural comparative study.Experiment1 was designed in within-subject style. It examined Chinese speakers only, following the"putting time point in three-dimensional space"task (Boroditsky, 2008). The result showed that, (1) participants used both vertical and horizontal directions of spatial representation to reflect time, and horizontal representation was dominant; (2) in horizontal direction, there were two different representations of time: left-right axis and front-back axis, and left-right axis was dominant; and (3) the mapping way of front-back axis mostly focused on the style of near-early and far-late. The result is quite different from Boroditsky's results about Chinese speakers (2008); however, it coordinates the English speakers'.To test further the psychological reality and the details of reflection of the two different horizontal representation, Experiment2 (2a,2b) examined participants'on-line processing on temporal order judgment. The results showed that, participants'responses were significantly affected by the location of response keys which were irrelevant to the task. Responses were shorter when"earlier"was responded with the left key and"later"with the right key, not the opposite condition; and participants responded faster to"earlier"with the key"near"themselves and to"later"with the key"away from"themselves. The directions of congruency effects were consistent with Experiment1. This result supported the psychological reality of the two different horizontal representations.Using"context pictures"as the experimental materials, Experiment3(3a,3b) examined the mental representation of meaning event sequences. The results showed that participants'responses were also significantly affected by the location of response keys which were irrelevant to the task. The directions of congruency effects were consistent with Experiment1 and Experiment2. It indicated that left-right axis and front-back axis were also imported into the mental representation of meaning event sequences.This article provided experimental evidence for space-time concept metaphors. In addition, it showed that (1) time can be specialized in a variety of ways, and (2) there is no significant difference, with regard to the mode and preference of time representation, between native Chinese speakers and English speakers that reported by other researchers.