Mandarin Speakers’ Preferences In Their Spatial Representation Of Time

The present study is experimental research focusing on Mandarin speakers’ preference in the spatial representation of time. It has been found with Mandarin speakers that they can freely conceptualize time in three-dimensional space, including transverse (left-right), sagittal (front-behind), and vertical (above-below) axes; and their patterns of thinking about time are consistent with patterns of language and culture. Under the framework of Embodied Realism, three behavioral experiments are conducted to detect whether Mandarin speakers equally favor spatialization of time on different axes, or prefer to spatialize time on a particular axis.The first experiment asked participants to freely place time points in three-dimensional space. The results show that Mandarin speakers overwhelmingly prefer to spatialize time on the transverse axis. Within the transverse axis, people showed evidence for left-to-right representation of time, which is predictable by the reading/writing habits; they also showed an earlier-behind and later-front association when spatializing time on the sagittal axis, and an earlier-above and later-below pattern that is congruent with patterns of vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin Chinese. The second experiment employs an implicit association task to provide support in terms of online processing for the first experiment. It corroborates our findings about the preference for transverse representation and about the time-space association patterns within axis. The third experiment specially investigates Mandarin speakers’time orientation (i.e., whether the speaker/ego faces the future or the past) in MOVING TIME metaphor processing, in order to test a possible explanation for the contradictory results between the present study and Lai&Boroditsky (2013). The results imply that cultural attitude also plays a role in modulating people’s time orientation.Taken together, these findings provide support for the effect of sensorimotor experience and conceptual metaphors on shaping and influencing people’s representation of abstract concepts.