Are Temporal-space Cognitive Frames Asymmetric?

Currently,most researches on Temporal-Spatial metaphor have paradigms that distinguish different temporal or spatial cognitive frames and consider their relation,or that take cross-culture methods to find idiosyncratic temporal-spatial metaphors outside the Indo-European languages,or that emphasize brain sciences in order to find physiological evidences in brain.The different paradigms and the different subjects cause different ideas on temporal-spatial metaphors:some scholars think that temporal cognition and spatial cognition are highly consistent,while others argue that there are asymmetries between temporal cognition and spatial cognition;some scholars believe that Chinese have unique patterns compared to the Indo-Europeans when talking about time,while others argue that Chinese are not unique just because Chinese may have preferences in choosing directions of temporal-spatial cognitive frames…However,researchers mainly concern on adult subjects,in other words,adult subjects may have rigid patterns of their temporal-spatial cognitive frames.Rigid frames mean that we have a plausible result when analyzing the rigid frames;on the other hand,they also mean that we could not deduct evolutionary process from the rigid frames.A few researchers have focused on children subjects,but only for Indo-European ones;although there are many researches about temporal-spatial frames,which concerned on Chinese adult subjects,the researches on Chinese children subjects remain vacant.This study focuses on the temporal-spatial cognitive frames of preschool and junior class children.This study randomly selected about 150 Chinese children subjects from 5 to 8 years old(half male and half female),let the children subjects sit in an unfamiliar classroom to answer the classic ambiguity temporal and spatial questions,and finally compared and analyzed the subjects' results.Every children subject stay with experimenter by himself/herself during the experiment,and after answered the basic information question(age)children subjects need to answer one temporal ambiguity question,two spatial ambiguity questions in pair and one character recognition question.In order to test the flexibility on spatial recognition frames of children subjects,the paired spatial ambiguity questions contain two opposite perspectives.After answering the three ambiguity questions,the final character recognition question was presented on paper and experimenter pointed to the character and asked the subject whether he/she recognize it in order to see language study's influence on children temporal-spatial cognitive frames.Experimental results showed that the temporal-spatial cognitive frames of Chinese children subjects are different with those of Chinese adult subjects and that the temporal frames vary with the same direction of the spatial frames accordingly.In short,this study supports that the Chinese children have different preference in choosing temporal and spatial cognitive frames with Chinese adult,and during the development process the change of temporal and spatial cognitive frames of Chinese children are covariant.These results demonstrate that the symmetry of temporal-spatial cognitive frames exist,at least in Chinese children.