How do Mandarin speakers conceptualize time? Beyond the horizontal and vertical dimensions

Learning to comprehend and explain spatial metaphors for time in Chinese

Time is frequently structured in terms of motion as moving-time (e.g., "summer is coming"), moving-ego (e.g., "we approach winter"), or sequence-as-position (e.g., "winter follows autumn") across the world's languages, including Chinese - a language that shows greater variability in its expression of such metaphors. Using a metaphor explanation and a metaphor comprehension task, we tested 60 children learning Chinese, equally divided into ages 3-4, 5-6, 7-8. Children's performance improved with age, marking ages 7-8 as the period with significant gains in both comprehension and explanation of metaphors - a later mastery compared to children learning English shown in earlier work. Metaphor type also affected children's performance, but only for the explanation and not the comprehension of metaphors. Overall, our findings highlight that the structure of spatial metaphors for time in Chinese influences the timing but not the trajectory of children's development in learning spatial metaphors for time.

When time stands upright: STEARC effects along the vertical axis

According to the spatial-temporal association of response codes (STEARC) effect, time can be spatially represented from left to right. However, exploration of a possible STEARC effect along the vertical axis has yielded mixed results. Here, in six experiments based on a novel paradigm, we systematically explored whether a STEARC effect could emerge when participants were asked to classify the actual temporal duration of a visual stimulus. Speeded manual responses were provided using a vertically oriented response box. Interestingly, although a top-to-bottom time representation emerged when only two temporal durations were employed, an inverted bottom-to-top time representation emerged when a denser set of temporal durations, arranged along a continuum, was used. Moreover, no STEARC effects emerged when participants classified the shapes of visual stimuli rather than their temporal duration. Finally, three additional experiments explored the STEARC effect along the horizontal axis, confirming that the paradigm we devised successfully replicated the standard left-to-right representation of time. These results provide supporting evidence for the notion that temporal durations can be mapped along the vertical axis, and that such mapping appears to be relatively flexible.

Spatial conceptual mapping of words with temporal semantics

Unlike concrete words related to sensory perception (e.g., hear, sun), abstract words (including the words with temporal semantics, e.g., year, tomorrow) do not have direct embodied sensory correlates. Nevertheless, existing research indicates that abstract concepts’ representations make regular reference to sensorimotor processes, e.g., visual perception. For example, regular expressions such as “the future is ahead” or “the flow of time” are common in different languages reflecting a relatively universal nature of space-time correspondences. Moreover, these regular correspondences are commonly demonstrated in experimental studies; for example — by registering attentional displacement during processing of past and future related words. Here, the main theoretical approaches as well as existing experimental data documenting neurocognitive foundations of space-time representations are reviewed. A detailed overview of research on spatial-conceptual mapping of time concepts in three-dimensional visual space is offered. We also consider features of space-time associations that reflect linguistic and socio-cultural differences. In conclusion, the main areas of current and future that will allow an integration of the existing data within a common theoretical framework are defined.