How Chinese - English Bilinguals Think About Time: The Effects of Language on Space-Time Mappings

How Chinese - English Bilinguals Think About Time:

The Effects of Language on Space-Time Mappings

Qiu Jun Zhang

Department of Swedish and Multilingualism Magister’s Thesis in Bilingualism (15 credits) Supervisor: Emanuel Bylund Spångberg Spring term 2020

How Chinese - English Bilinguals Think About Time: The

Effects of Language on Space-Time Mappings

Zhang Qiu Jun

Abstract

The last decades have witnessed the resurgence of research on linguistic relativity, which provides empirical evidence of possible language effects on thought across various perceptual domains. This study investigated the linguistic relativity hypothesis in the abstract domain of time by looking at how L1 Chinese - L2 English bilinguals conceptualize time in two-dimensional space. English primarily relies on horizontal spatial items to talk about time (e.g., back to youth); in addition to horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., ‘front year’), Chinese speakers also commonly use vertical metaphors to describe time (e.g., ‘up week’). If language has an effect on thought, then spatial-temporal metaphors should shape people’s spatial-temporal cognition. In this study, we examined whether spatial-temporal metaphors impact online processing of time and long-term habitual thinking about time. Experiment 1 showed that bilinguals could automatically access the timeline which corresponded to the immediate linguistic context. In Experiment 2, a majority of bilinguals demonstrated salient vertical bias for temporal reasoning, whereas a small number of participants relied on the horizontal axis to represent time. The dominant thinking patterns for time documented here (65% prefer a vertical representation of time; 35% horizontal) run counter to the fact that horizontal metaphors are twice as common in Chinese as vertical metaphors. Further, it was found that bilinguals who used English more frequently were more likely to have a less vertical bias, which suggested a role of L2 experience in conceptual representations. Taken together, the evidence in this study showed that spatial-temporal metaphors have both short-term and long-term effects on mental representations of time, but also that space-time mappings do not depend solely on linguistic factors.

Keywords

Linguistic relativity, Chinese - English bilinguals, mental representations of time, spatial-temporal metaphors, language experience

Content

2.1 Spatial-temporal Metaphors in Chinese and English...3

2.1.1 Spatial-temporal metaphors along a horizontal plane...4

2.1.2 Spatial-temporal metaphors along a vertical plane...4

2.2. Empirical Studies on Chinese and English Speakers’ Space-time Mappings...6

2.2.1 On the effect of spatial-temporal metaphors...6

2.2.2 On bilinguals’ language history...8

2.2.3 On cultural variables...8

3. Theoretical Framework...12

3.1 Linguistic Relativity...12

3.2 Linguistic Metaphors and Mental Metaphors...13

4. Experiment 1...15

4.1 Methods...15

4.1.1 Participants...15

4.1.2 Design and Materials...16

4.1.3 Procedures...17 4.2 Results...17 4.3 Discussion...18 5. Experiment 2...20 5.1 Methods...20 5.1.1 Participants...20

5.1.2 Design and Materials...20

5.1.3 Procedures...20 5.2 Results...20 5.3 Discussion...22 6. General discussion...24 7. Conclusion...29 References...31 Appendix ...33

List of Tables

1. Table 1. Research questions and hypotheses...2 2. Table 2. An example of vertical metaphors for time in Chinese...5 3. Table 3. Pearson correlations between vertical bias and L2 factors...22

List of Figures

1. Figure 1. Results of Experiment 1...18

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to express my very great appreciation to my thesis supervisor Professor Emanuel Bylund Spångberg for his valuable suggestions and patient guidance through the process of researching and thesis-writing. It was him who provided me with a thesis topic about temporal cognition, which I found very interesting and then developed into my magister thesis. Whenever I had a problem with the research, he was always there to answer my questions and steered me in the right direction.

Secondly, I am particularly grateful for the 50 participants in the study. Without their participation, the data could not have been successfully collected and the thesis could not be accomplished. In addition, my special thanks are offered to my three friends, who took part in the pilot study and made suggestions on how to make the experiment more user-friendly.

Last but not least, I would like to express my profound gratitude to my parents for supporting and encouraging me at this difficult time.

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1. Introduction

Does language shape thought or does human cognition rely on language? This issue has been widely discussed in varying academic circles from linguistics to philosophy and psychology since the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis was introduced by Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956). Whorf argues that language-specific grammatical and lexical categories represent reality in a certain way and that this will have an influence on how we understand reality (Whorf, 1956). Certain linguistic categories would make some aspects of reality more or less noticeable to its speakers, which might affect their cognitive structure. If language can affect how the world is perceived and conceptualized, then linguistic relativity proposes that linguistic diversity will cause speakers of different languages to think differently. However, it is not convincing enough to claim that certain types of thinking are different just based on linguistic facts.

Therefore, the revival of research on linguistic relativity from the early 1990s calls for empirical evidence for differences in thinking. Instead of theorizing whether different languages bring about differences in thinking, the empirical studies in recent decades have yielded new insights into in which way language may impact thought across a wide range of domains such as motion, space and color (e.g., Papafragou & Selimis, 2010; Park & Ziegler, 2014; Athanasopoulos, 2009). Furthermore, the scope of the investigation into linguistic relativity has been expanded from monolinguals to bilinguals or second language learners in recent years. Since a language can affect the way its speakers perceive the world, the learning of a second language might exert an influence on learners’ cognition that is initially shaped by L1. L2 speakers’ cognitive restructuring is not only affected by the mastery of a given L2 linguistic property but also affected by other linguistic factors such as language exposure and language mode (Bylund and Athanasopoulos, 2014).

The question of whether Chinese and English speakers map time onto different spatial axes has attracted much attention. A few empirical studies have demonstrated that English speakers map time on a horizontal axis whereas Chinese speakers can conceive of time as both horizontal and vertical (e.g., Fuhrman, Mccormick, Chen,

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Jiang, & Shu, 2011; Miles, Tan, Noble, Lumsden and Macrae, 2011). The different patterns to talk about time in two languages, Chinese and English, are considered as a possible account of their differences in space-time mappings. In English, horizontal spatial terms are predominantly used to express time (e.g., miss our good days back to our youth but still look forward to the future). In addition to the common use of horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., 今 后 , ‘today back’), Chinese speakers also systematically adopt vertical metaphors via spatial morphemes such as 上 (‘up’) and 下 (‘down’).

Aims of the Present Thesis

The main goal of this study is to assess whether spatial-temporal metaphors can have short-term and long-term effects on Chinese-English bilinguals’ mental representations of time in two-dimensional space. Two experiments were carried out to look at two effects respectively. For an overview, our research questions and their corresponding hypotheses are provided in Table 1.

Research question 1: Can spatial-temporal metaphors produce an immediate effect on how people conceptualize time? Will bilinguals represent time in metaphor-specific ways?

Hypothesis 1: Spatial-temporal metaphors can play a shaping role in people’s temporal reasoning in the short term. Through the manipulations of metaphor use, bilinguals would respond in a way consistent with the priming metaphors.

Research question 2: Which mental timeline, horizontal or vertical, is more noticeable in Chinese-English bilinguals’ minds?

Hypothesis 2: A horizontal representation of time should be more favored among Chinese - English bilinguals.

Research question 3: Does L2 experience influence bilinguals’ temporal cognition and which aspect of language experience would have such an impact?

Hypothesis 3：L2 factors such as the age of acquisition, proficiency and frequency of use can predict bilinguals’ variation in temporal thinking.

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Experiment 1 inquired into the first question by prompting bilinguals with rich spatial-temporal metaphors in two languages before doing nonverbal tasks. Through the priming of spatial positions or of spatial metaphors in test questions, the former studies have demonstrated that spatial knowledge or spatial terms contained in spatial metaphors are employed during the online processing of time (Boroditsky, 2001; Lai & Boroditsky, 2013). Based on the previous evidence, we assume an effect of linguistic relativity that Chinese-English bilinguals would adjust their mental representations of time immediately to specific spatial-temporal metaphors they read. Experiment 2 focused on long-term language effects on space-time mappings by examining the second and third research questions. Considering that horizontal metaphors prevail in English and horizontal metaphors outnumber vertical ones in Chinese (Chen, 2007), most of L1 Chinese - L2 English bilinguals should prefer the horizontal thinking pattern about time if spatial-temporal metaphors indeed shape habitual thinking about time. Furthermore, to have bilingual subjects in the study provides an opportunity to investigate whether additional language learning might function as cognitive restructuring. The recent studies have discovered a link between L2 experience and bilingual cognition (e.g. Fuhrman et al., 2011), and therefore it is hypothesized here that to some extent certain aspect of long-term English experience can impact on bilinguals’ space-time mappings.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Spatial-temporal Metaphors in Chinese and English

To study the relationship between language diversity, cognitive diversity, and bilingualism, the perceptual domains of space and time are of central interest. Time is abstract but space is concrete, in that one can directly tell the distance or positions in a physical environment but time cannot be seen nor touched. To mentally represent time, people usually use spatial timelines and incorporate irrelevant spatial information into temporal judgment (Boroditsky, 2000; Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008). In language, time is also closely related to space. Language often uses the spatial representation of time, but different languages exhibit variation in their specific spatial metaphors of time.

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If language can affect thought, then it is predicted that speakers across languages using different spatial-temporal metaphors will differ in their temporal cognition.

In Chinese and English, there are horizontal spatial metaphors, but additional vertical metaphors are often employed in Chinese. As mentioned above, a few studies have revealed that the linguistic divergences in spatial-temporal metaphors between Chinese and English are associated with different space-time mappings of their speakers (Boroditsky, 2001; Fuhrman et al., 2011; Miles et al., 2011) In other words, both Chinese and English speakers can conceive of time as horizontal but Chinese speakers are more likely to have a vertical space-time mapping than English speakers are. In what follows, a comparison of spatial-temporal metaphors between Chinese and English will be made along two planes.

2.1.1 Spatial-temporal metaphors along a horizontal plane

Along a horizontal plane, front/back spatial-temporal metaphors are used in Chinese as commonly as in English. In Chinese, the basic spatial word for 前 (‘front’) is a morpheme used in temporal phrases to express the past or an earlier time point (e.g., 前年, ‘front year’, which idiomatically means the year before last; 以前, ‘this front’, which idiomatically means in the past). The basic spatial word for 后 (‘back’) is also a morpheme in temporal phrases to express the future or a later time point (e.g., 后年, ‘back year’, which idiomatically means the year after next; 今后, ‘today back’, which idiomatically means the future). In English, there are equivalents to front/back spatial terms in Chinese, namely ahead/behind, forward/back and before/after (e.g., ahead of schedule, the past is behind us, bring the wedding forward by three days, back to youth, before/after Labor’s Day). These horizontal metaphors for time in both languages reflect or strengthen a horizontal space-time mapping in their speakers. Furthermore, it is widely recognized that English speakers talk and think about the past as at the back of the individual and the future as in front of the individual, but a variety of front/back temporal metaphors in Chinese suggest both past-at-back and past-in-front thinking patterns of time (Boroditsky, 2000; Yu,2012; Ng, Goh, Yap, Tse, & So, 2017; Gu & Zheng, 2019).

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2.1.2 Spatial-temporal metaphors along a vertical plane

Vertical spatial-temporal metaphors are much more frequently used in Chinese than in English (Zhang & Ding, 2006; Liu & Zhang, 2009). In Chinese, the spatial terms for 上/下 (‘up/down’) are commonly attached to time nouns to talk about the time order. For example, as shown in Table 2, a day is divided into two parts by the use of 上/下 (‘up/down’), namely 上午 (‘up noon’, which idiomatically means the morning) and 下午 (‘down noon’, which idiomatically means the afternoon); the last month is 上个月 (‘up month’) and the next month is 下个月 (‘down month’). As we can see, 上 (‘up’) refers to the past or earlier events and 下 (‘down’) refers to the future and later events. These use of vertical terms to express time is believed to has something to do with ancient Chinese people’s observation that the sun rises above the horizon early in the day and sinks below the horizon with the passing of time (Wang & Chen, 2009). The relative position of the sun to the horizon (above/below) tells how time flows, that is to say, time flows vertically from top to bottom. The 上/下 (‘up/down’) spatial terms indicate that time can be conceptualized vertically in the minds of Chinese speakers.

In English, similar spatial terms such as up and down are used to express time (e.g., up to now, hand down traditions from generation to generation). However, the use of vertical metaphors in English is not as common as its use in Chinese. If the frequent use of vertical metaphors has the power to make speakers develop the corresponding space-time mapping, Chinese speakers are supposed to have a tendency to represent time via a vertical axis that English speakers would not.

Table 2. An example of vertical metaphors for time in Chinese

In a word, both Chinese speakers and English speakers frequently use spatial-temporal metaphors on a horizontal plane to talk about time. However, the systematic use of vertical metaphors in Chinese suggests an additional vertical timeline in Chinese speakers.

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2.2 Empirical Studies on Chinese and English Speakers’ Space-time Mappings 2.2.1 On the Effect of Spatial-Temporal Metaphors

In the previous work about the mental representation of time, Boroditsky (2001) was one of the pioneers to study whether the different use of spatial-temporal metaphors in English and Chinese affects conceptual processing of time in both short and long term. In her spatial priming task, English speakers answered purely temporal questions faster after horizontal primes than vertical primes, but Chinese speakers were faster after vertical primes (Boroditsky, 2001, p.10). Boroditsky attributed English speakers’ horizontal bias and Chinese speakers’ vertical bias to the frequent use of vertical spatial metaphors in Chinese that were not common in English. Consistent with Boroditsky (2001), Fuhrman et al. (2011) discovered a vertical pattern for time only in Chinese speakers. Judging from the observation that Chinese speakers have a vertical representation of time, it appears that the metaphor use can have a long-term effect on shaping habitual thoughts about time. The different thinking patterns for time between Chinese and English speakers in the above studies provided supporting evidence for an effect of linguistic relativity, to be specific, the long-term effects of spatial-temporal metaphors on temporal cognition. In addition to its chronic effect, Lai and Boroditsky (2013) discovered an immediate impact of two kinds of spatial-temporal metaphors in Chinese. Chinese speakers were more likely to represent time on a horizontal plane when processing ‘front/back’ metaphors in test questions, and more likely to arrange time vertically when understanding ‘up/down’ metaphors.

Against the hypothesis that spatial metaphors for time play an important role in people’s mental representations of time, some previous studies (e.g., Chen 2007; Yang & Sun, 2016) did not verify differences in temporal cognition between Chinese and English speakers. For example, Chen (2007) failed to replicate the effects of spatial priming in Boroditsky’ s work (2001). In his findings, Chinese speakers did not think about time differently from English speakers as both Chinese and English speakers responded to temporal sentences more slowly after a horizontal prime than after a vertical prime (Chen, 2007, p.432). Yang and Sun (2016) also reported that only 20 per cent of Chinese speakers showed a salient vertical space-time mapping and the other

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80 per cent of Chinese speakers displayed a strong horizontal bias in temporal cognition as English speakers did (p.398). These inconsistent findings gave rise to some controversies over the question of whether spatial-temporal metaphors shape speakers’ space-time mappings, and whether Chinese and English speakers conceptualize time differently due to cross-linguistic differences in spatial metaphors for time. The only certainty is that there is no simple causal relationship between spatial-temporal metaphors and space-time mappings, or between language and thought.

Furthermore, the grounds for logical assumptions weare dubious in some studies

which gaive strong backing to the effect of spatial-temporal metaphors on temporal reasoning. First, some previous work (e.g., Boroditsky 2001; Miles et al., 2011) only concentrated attention on the vertical metaphors associated with a vertical timeline in Chinese speakers’ minds but failed to notice that the use of horizontal metaphors in Chinese might suggest a horizontal timeline. It is probable that Chinese speakers already have two distinct representations of time, vertical and horizontal, as reflected by two types of spatial-temporal metaphors in Chinese. For example, the neglect of horizontal terms in Chinese to express time is evident in Miles et al. (2011) when they discussed the results showing that Chinese-English bilinguals possessed both vertical and horizontal mental timelines. In their words, the use of spatial-temporal metaphors along a vertical plane in Chinese is reflected in Chinese-English bilinguals’ vertical cognitive mapping of time while their horizontal representation of time in mind is consistent with the predominant use of horizontal spatial metaphors in English (Miles et al., 2011, p.601). In fact, horizontal metaphors in both Chinese and English can help structure Chinese-English bilinguals’ horizontal space-time mapping. Second, the implicit assumption in Boroditsky’s study (2001) that vertical spatial-temporal metaphors are more frequently used than horizontal ones in Chinese wais not well-established. Chen argued that vertical metaphors only account for one-third of all spatial-temporal metaphors in Chen’s collected Chinese corpus (2007, p.429). If based on Chen’s linguistic observations in Chinese, it should be predicted that Chinese speakers are twice as likely to display a horizontal bias in temporal reasoning as to show a vertical bias in Boroditsky’s paradigm.

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Apart from the above linguistic factors, many studies have shown that space-time mappings can be conditioned by other variables, including speakers’ proficiency in L2, the age of L2 acquisition, and cross-cultural differences in temporal focus and writing system (e.g., Boroditsky 2001; Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Fuhrman et al., 2011; Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache, & Casasanto, 2014). This will be reviewed next.

2.2.2 On bilinguals’ language history

In Fuhrman et al.’s study (2011), proficiency in Chinese predicted English-Chinese bilinguals’ time arrangement in space. Among these English - Chinese bilinguals who relied on the vertical axis to represent time, the number of bilinguals with high proficiency in Chinese was almost twice as large as those with low proficiency in Chinese. The more proficient in Chinese, the more likely bilinguals were to represent time in a way consistent with vertical metaphors in Chinese. As Bylund and Athanasopoulos state regarding the effect of L2 proficiency on cognitive restructuring: higher proficiency in L2 indicates the increased knowledge in L2 perception-related lexical and grammatical categories, which may reshape habitual thinking (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014, p.969). Considering that the age of acquisition is closely related to L2 proficiency, the age of acquisition may influence bilinguals’ conceptual processing of time as well. Boroditsky (2001) found a positive correlation between the age of English acquisition and the vertical bias in temporal reasoning among Chinese -English bilinguals with different language experience. The younger an individual was when learning English, the less likely they would be to display a vertical timeline (Boroditsky, 2001, p.15). It seems that early L2 learners can develop L2-specific thinking habits more easily than late L2 learners.

2.2.3 On cultural variables

2.2.3.1 Cultural and linguistic context

Some other studies have put cultural factors into the research of cognitive mappings of time (e.g., Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Miles et al., 2011; de la Fuente et al., 2014; Gu & Yan 2019; Bylund, Gygax, Samuel, & Athanasopoulos, 2020). Through a card

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arrangement task, Miles et al. revealed that a cultural context (via the photos of a Chinese or American actor) can bias Chinese-English bilinguals’ use of space-time mappings. Nearly two-thirds of the bilinguals used the vertical axis when arranging photos of Chinese characters in a time sequence, whereas two-thirds of them chose the horizontal axis in the arrangement of American character’s photos (Miles et al., 2011, p.602). A similar effect of an immediate context was confirmed in Fuhrman et al’ Experiment 2 (2011) that Chinese-English bilinguals were twice as likely to arrange temporal sequences vertically when receiving Chinese instructions as to represent time vertically when tested in English. An immediate context seems to have an influence on bilinguals’ conceptual representations in real-time, as it may trigger language-specific perceptual attributes after activating this language in bilinguals’ minds (Bylund and Athanasopoulos, 2014, p.973).

2.2.3.2 Writing direction

Some studies also demonstrated that in which direction people move eyes from start to the end of a text line in reading or writing may influence people’s mental representations of the flow of time (e.g., Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Casasanto and Bottini, 2014). Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010) noticed that the way Hebrew and English speakers arranged temporal sequences was consistent with the writing-direction in their language. In a space-time congruity task, Dutch speakers exhibited a varying mental timeline as they read the stimuli in rightward, leftward, upward and downward orthography (Casasanto & Bottini, 2014).

If writing direction is one of the possible factors in shaping speakers’ space-time mappings, English speakers’ horizontal representation of time can be regarded as a combined consequence of the preponderant use of horizontal metaphors and the rightward writing direction in English. In Chinese, text can be read and written in both vertical and horizontal columns as vertical and horizontal space metaphors are commonly used in Chinese. Text is arranged vertically in ancient Chinese, but horizontal writing direction (from left to right) gradually replaced traditional vertical writing (from top to bottom) after the Mainland China officially simplified Chinese

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characters in the 1950s. In Fuhrman et al.’s Experiment 2 (2011), Chinese - English bilinguals having a different experience with vertical text were recruited to test whether writing direction can predict how time is arranged spatially. After selecting a spot in space as a reference point and assigning a spot a middle time point such as today, the experimenter asked participants to locate time points such as yesterday/tomorrow. It was found that Chinese-English bilinguals who had some vertical text-reading experience were less likely to arrange time rightward but there were no significant differences in the vertical arrangement of time between bilinguals reporting some experience with vertical text and those who never read the text in vertical columns (Fuhrman et al., 2011, p.1321). Considering the switch from vertical writing to horizontal writing in Chinese since last century, the bilinguals in Fuhrman et al.’s experiments were too young to gain sufficient reading and writing experience with text arranged vertically, which may lead to the unpredictive role of writing direction in the vertical representation of time. Overall, the existing evidence has shown that vertical metaphors in Chinese, more than writing direction, influence how its speakers spatialize time.

2.2.3.3 Cultural attitudes towards time

Some recent studies have been devoted to the effect of temporal cultural attitudes since de la Fuente et al. put forward the temporal-focus hypothesis in 2014. According to the hypothesis, space-time mappings on a sagittal axis depend in part on whether speakers’ culture is past-focused or future-focused (de la Fuente et al., 2014, p.1682). Although the evidence from Spaniards and Moroccans supports the temporal-focus hypothesis, Gu et al. did not find an effect of temporal attitude on Chinese speakers’ mappings of time at a within-cultural level (de la Fuente et al.; 2014, Gu et al., 2019). Bylund et al. (2020) tested the hypothesis at a cross-cultural level, but their results showed that most of their Afrikaner and British participants preferred to position future as in front of them despite the fact that Afrikaners were more past-focused than British. Although the temporal-focus hypothesis needs further academic discussions and empirical evidence, its perspective on cultural values towards time provides a new

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account of the variation in the conceptualization of time along a horizontal plane among speakers of different languages.

To summarize, the spatial representation of time can be affected by linguistic and cultural factors. Across languages and cultures, concrete spatial terms are borrowed to linguistically express the abstract concepts of time. If there are any linguistic relativity effects, it is easily predicted that spatial metaphors would affect one’s temporal cognition and speakers using different spatial metaphors would represent time in a way consistent with their spatial metaphors. Plenty of previous studies investigated Chinese and English speakers’ mental representations of time but their conclusions diverged on the issue of whether language shapes thought. Some studies supporting the language effect on thought found that Chinese speakers favored the vertical arrangement of time and English speakers overwhelmingly relied on the horizontal timeline. Some other studies claimed that Chinese and English speakers did not differ in space-time mappings, thus casting doubt on the relationship between language and thought. It still remains unclear to what extent spatial-temporal metaphors can shape speakers’ thoughts in cognitive domains such as space and time, and space-time mappings are too complex to be only conditioned by spatial language or spatial-temporal metaphors. When it comes to bilinguals, the linguistic factors in restructuring temporal cognition are not limited to spatial-temporal metaphors in two languages but concern the immediate linguistic context and one’s language experience such as the age of acquisition, proficiency and use frequency. Some previous work showed that the age of acquisition and language proficiency were powerful predictors of cognitive space-time mappings (Boroditsky 2001; Fuhrman et al. 2011). Along with any factors related to language, writing direction across language and attitudes toward time across culture have been proposed to produce a possible effect on Chinese-English bilinguals’ space-time mappings.

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3. Theoretical Framework

The relationship between language and thought is intricate and intertwined, in that we sometimes have to think with the aid of natural language but sometimes come up with thoughts that are difficult to express in language. Language is separate from thought, but they are somehow related. The question of how to understand the relationship between language and thought has always remained a big interest in academic circles.

The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis has opened the door to investigate the interaction between language and thought. The principle of linguistic relativity is that various lexical and grammatical categories used in different languages to describe the world assign speakers’ attention to certain information, which causes cross-linguistic differences in perception and conceptual representations (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014, p.965). Based on the assumption that a linguistic system such as its semantics and syntax can affect how we present the world in our minds (Whorf, 1956, p.213), linguistic relativity holds that speakers of different languages would differ in their worldviews and habitual behavior. Since Benjamin Lee Whorf advanced the idea of linguistic relativity in the 1950s, it has followed along a strong-to-weak continuum and has been explored through empirical studies in the past three decades.

Linguistic Determinism assumes that language, as a privileged shaper of thought, can determine its basic categories (Whorf, 1956). In this strong version of linguistic relativity, language and thought are connected tightly and linguistic-specific properties across languages are believed to cause speakers’ differences in thought. However, language does not necessarily alone play a shaping role in thought, because perceptual capabilities that human beings are born with can affect how the world is conceptualized before the intervention of language (Wolff & Holmes, 2011, p.254). For instance, in recent studies on experiential relativity (e.g., Casasanto, 2009), bodily interactions with the physical world weare found to construct people’s thoughts in a similar way as language does. As the untenable claim of linguistic determinism loses support, a

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returning interest in linguistic relativity grows with nonverbal empirical evidence. Instead of discussing whether language can influence or, in the extreme, shape thought only based on language diversity, contemporary research on this issue seeks a middle ground that under which circumstances which linguistic categories play a role in the specific cognitive process. (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2013).

In an advanced review of linguistic relativity based on empirical support, Wolff and Holmes (2011) conclude four types of roles that linguistic knowledge might play in affecting cognitive processing. The first two types are linguistic meddling and augmenting, which occur in the online utilization of linguistic representations. In the effect of linguistic meddling, relevant linguistic properties can either facilitate or compete with non-linguistic representations, whereas linguistic codes help form the mental rules necessary for some conceptual domains, in the case of language as augmenter (Wolff & Holmes, 2011, p.256-258). In addition to the above effects, language is considered as spotlight or inducer, which can bias its speakers to certain categories of thoughts highlighted by linguistic properties (Wolff & Holmes, 2011). Even when language is not put into use during the processing, the long-term use of language makes relativistic effects persist in nonverbal tasks.

3.2 Linguistic Metaphors and Mental Metaphors

As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) believe that abstract concepts have to be understood in terms of simple concrete concepts (p.56), it would be hard to describe and conceptualize abstract domains without the help of linguistic metaphors. The metaphorical way of talking about abstract entities might produce or reflect corresponding metaphorical thoughts.

Among concrete source domains, space is frequently used to metaphorically talk about abstract target domains such as time and pitch. Talking in spatial metaphors has been found to help people develop the corresponding mental representations of target domains (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001; Dolscheid et al., 2013; Lai & Boroditsky, 2013). For example, Dolscheid et al. (2013) let Dutch and Farsi speakers reproduce pitches while being presented with irrelevant spatial information such as height and thickness.

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Consistent with space-pitch metaphors high/low in Dutch and thick/thin in Farsi, Dutch speakers incorporated only height information into pitch estimates and Farsi speakers were affected simply by thickness-pitch interference (Dolscheid et al., 2013). Such an association between space-pitch metaphors and mental representations of pitches was also confirmed in another experiment, where a group of Dutch speakers could flexibly switch from their linguistically preferred height-pitch mappings to thickness-pitch mappings after twenty-minute training of using thickness-pitch metaphors (Dolscheid et al., 2013). These experimental results showed that both temporary and long-term language experience using spatial metaphors can have an effect on non-linguistic mental representations.

Now one question comes up: how would one represent the abstract domains before having any linguistic experience of metaphors? Dolscheid et al. (2014) proved that four-months-old infants who were too young to use any spatial metaphors could represent pitch via both height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings. Through the observation of the physical world, infants can generate prelinguistic mental representations of an abstract domain. As Casasanto and Bottini conclude (2014), initial source-target mappings constructed by innate or early learned cross-domain correspondences are presumably universal (p.142). When these infants grow up into adults and use linguistic metaphors such as space-pitch or space-time metaphors, all their prelinguistic source-target associations are retained but language-specific mappings are strengthened as a result of habitually using source-target metaphors and at the expense of other competing prelinguistic mappings (Casasanto, 2016).

Based on the above empirical studies, Casasanto and Bottini (2014) propose the hierarchical mental metaphors theory, which hypothesizes a two-stage process in developing source-target mappings. At the first stage, a family of associative mappings between source and target domains are universal to all human beings when they are infants and prelinguistic children. After exposure to linguistic metaphors and cultural practices, certain types of mappings in the same family are preferred and strengthened (Casasanto & Bottini, 2014). Every time people use certain linguistic metaphors in their language, they activate and reinforce their corresponding mental representation, which

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would weaken other prelinguistic mental representations in the long term. Although people do not lose their initial mappings, language-specific mappings gradually take over from other members of a general mapping family due to the frequent use of linguistic metaphors.

On this theory, people’s mental representations of an abstract domain can be adjusted and modified flexibly since initial mappings still exist in adults’ minds and can be reactivated via corresponding linguistic metaphors. However, people’s cognitive mechanisms are not necessarily conditioned by linguistic metaphors. Other kinds of physical and social experience such as non-linguistic cultural practices and bodily experience with the environment are proven to have an influence on certain types of thinking in different conceptual domains (Casasanto, 2016).

4. Experiment 1

Altogether 30 L1 Chinese – L2 English bilinguals participated in Experiment 1. Prior to the experiment, informed consent from every participant was obtained. All participants completed an online questionnaire adapted from Marian’s (2007) Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q). The questionnaire asked about participants’ biographical information and their language experience in each language. Participants were required to list all languages they know in order of dominance and acquisition, tell the age of acquisition, report the use frequency and assess listening, speaking, reading and writing proficiency in Chinese and English on a scale from 0 to 10 (0 = no knowledge of the language, 10 = perfect).

The participants were all native speakers of Chinese from mainland China, Hongkong and Taiwan (20 females, 10 males, Mage = 26.1, SDage = 7.65). 8 participants lived in China and the remaining 22 participants studied or worked in English-speaking countries or other European countries. They used Chinese and English on a daily basis for different purposes. The participants’ average age of acquisition of English was 8.87 years (SD = 2.69). The 30 Chinese-English bilinguals

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self-reported their proficiency in Chinese and English at different levels (Mean Chinese proficiency = 9.08, SD = .99; Mean English proficiency = 6.96, SD = 1.10).

4.1.2 Design and Materials

For the experimental design, a paradigm was adopted from Fuhrman et al.’s (2011) Experiment 1, in which participants decided whether a given picture exhibited an earlier or later time point after being presented with a picture showing a middle time point. Responses were given by pressing buttons and the reaction time along a horizontal or vertical plane was measured and compared to see how participants process space-time associations in two-dimensional space implicitly. Materials contained 28 sets of images and four priming texts, two in English with horizontal metaphors and the other two in Chinese with vertical metaphors. Each set included two images describing temporal progression. That is to say, the first image showed a middle time point and the second image showed an earlier or later time point than the middle one. The content of images can be summarized into four themes: celebrities in different age stages, food before being eaten and after being eaten, plants or animals in various growth phases and well-known buildings from different ages.

For example, a set of images about “the watermelon” included “a watermelon cut into halves” (a middle time point) and “a watermelon cut into quarters” (a later time point). Four priming texts were rich in spatial-temporal metaphors, but the content of four texts was irrelevant to any themes described in the images. The length of each Chinese priming text was around 150 Chinese characters and ten vertical metaphors using spatial terms such as 上(‘up’) and 下(‘down’) were embedded into each text. Similarly, each 100-word English text covered ten horizontal metaphors including before/after, ahead/behind and forward/back. Besides, non-spatial language for time such as earlier/later was used in the task instructions to minimize the effect of other linguistic content. With the software PsyToolkit (Stoet, 2010, 2017), materials were presented within the size of 800 by 600 pixels.

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4.1.3 Procedures

With the help of the software PsyToolkit (Stoet, 2010, 2017), the experiment was run in a web-based environment, which meant participants could use their own computers to complete the experiment after clicking on a link. Half of the 30 participants were selected randomly to complete the experiment with Chinese priming texts and half were primed with English texts. Both two groups did the same task (including one horizontal block and one vertical block) but differed in the instruction languages and the priming text they read before each testing block.

In the whole task, participants saw the horizontal block before the vertical block, each consisting of 14 trials. Before the start of each block, the Chinese priming group had forty-five seconds to read a Chinese priming text with vertical metaphors. Likewise, the English priming group had forty-five seconds to read an English priming text with horizontal metaphors. On each trial, the picture showing a middle time point from one of 28 sets was presented on the screen for 3500 ms before participants judged whether the second picture from the same set showed an earlier or later time point than the first picture. In the horizontal block, participants were instructed to respond by pressing one of two keys on a horizontal axis (“F” represented an earlier time point and “J” a later time point). For the vertical block, the pressing buttons were “Y” and “B” on a vertical axis (“Y” represented an earlier time point and “B” a later time point). Besides, there was a 15-second interval between two blocks and one set of images only appeared once in the whole task. The response time was measured from the onset of the second picture to the key-pressing by participants.

4.2 Results

For the data collection, the software PsyToolkit wais used (Stoet, 2010, 2017). Only the right responses within 4000 ms were taken into analysis. The overall accuracy rate for two groups was 88.93% and the accuracy rate did not differ by two priming groups (89.29% for the Chinese priming group and 88.57% for the English priming group) or by orientation (89.89% for the horizontal block and 87.97% for the vertical block).

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faster when the answering key was arranged on a vertical axis (M = 1076 ms, SD = 325) than when it was on a horizontal axis (M = 1351ms, SD = 374) ( the vertical bias = 275 ms, paired-samples t-tests t(14) = 7.494, p = .000). In the English priming group, participants showed a reverse pattern that the response times in the horizontal block (M = 1160 ms, SD = 372) were significantly shorter than those in the vertical block (M = 1394 ms, SD = 389) ( the horizontal bias = 234ms, pairedsamples ttests t(14) = -14.477, p = .000). After being primed with vertical metaphors in Chinese, the Chinese priming group displayed a strong bias towards a vertical space-time mapping whereas the English priming group favored the mental representation of time along a horizontal plane after reading English texts with a set of horizontal metaphors. The above differences in temporal reasoning between two groups were also confirmed as interactions between orientation (horizontal vs vertical) and types of priming metaphors (F = 7.239, p = .009).

Fig.1. Results of Experiment 1: Response times of two priming groups. Participants’ mean response times (in milliseconds) along horizontal and vertical axes are plotted for the Chinese and English priming groups.

4.3 Discussion

In Experiment 1 it was examined whether spatial-temporal metaphors can have a short-term impact on Chinese - English bilinguals’ space-time mappings. We found that the two groups demonstrated different thinking patterns about time which were consistent with types of spatial-temporal metaphors they were primed with. The results

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provided evidence that certain space-time mapping, vertical or horizontal, was strengthened in bilinguals’ minds after reading corresponding spatial-temporal metaphors.

The findings from Experiment 1 confirmed the previous study showing an online effect of spatial-temporal metaphors on mental representations of time (Lai & Boroditsky, 2013) and, importantly, extended such an effect within one language to two languages and from Chinese monolinguals to Chinese - English bilinguals. In Lai and Boroditsky’s study (2013), Chinese speakers were asked to locate time points such as last/next week by pointing to a spatial location around them. When vertical metaphors in Chinese such as 上周 (‘up week’) were used as a part of test questions, Chinese speakers preferred to layout time vertically. In contrast, Chinese speakers were more likely to arrange time along a sagittal axis after hearing front/back terms in Chinese instructions. The explicit spatial-temporal metaphors in test questions highlighted certain space-time associations and made participants spatialize time in a language-specific way. A bit different from Lai and Boroditsky’s method of priming, Experiment 1 prompted one group with vertical metaphors in Chinese and the other group with horizontal metaphors in English, the meanings of which were irrelevant to the following implicit task. The immediate use of vertical metaphors in Chinese texts strengthened bilinguals’ vertical space-time mapping, as reflected by the bias to think about time vertically in the Chinese priming group. Similarly, horizontal metaphors in English texts inclined bilinguals in the English priming group towards a horizontal mental representation of time in a short time.

Furthermore, the different bias in space-time mappings shown in the two groups was consistent with Miles et al.’s (2011) conclusion that Chinese-English bilinguals have multiple space-time mappings. Nonetheless, specific space-time associations can be activated and reinforced to have the upper hand through linguistic manipulations such as the priming of spatial-temporal metaphors. Using the same experimental paradigm as Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was conducted to examine whether spatial-temporal metaphors can have a long-term effect on bilinguals’ mental representations of time and what kind of space-time mapping is more favored.

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5. Experiment 2

5.1.1 Participants

Another 20 Chinese-English bilinguals voluntarily participated in Experiment 2. Before doing the experiment, every participant completed the same language background questionnaire adapted from Marian’s (2007) LEAP-Q, which collected linguistic variables such as proficiency, use frequency and age of acquisition. All participants were native speakers of Chinese and acquired Chinese prior to English (14 females, 6 males, Mage = 24.65, SDage = 2.41; Mean age of acquisition in English = 9.4, SD = .59; Mean Chinese proficiency = 9.08, SD = .99; Mean English proficiency = 7.04, SD = 1.11). In addition, four bilinguals reported a third language in daily use.

5.1.2. Design and materials

Experiment 2 adopted the design from Fuhrman et al.’s study (2011) as Experiment 1 did. The materials used in Experiment 2 contained 28 sets of images which were no different from those in Experiment 1.

5.1.3. Procedures

Except for no priming texts before each block, the procedures were identical to those in Experiment 1. The instruction was given in English.

5.2. Results

The data was collected with the software PsyToolkit (Stoet, 2010, 2017). Error responses or responses exceeding 4000 ms were discarded from the data set and thus not included in the analysis. The overall accuracy rate in 20 participants’ responses was 90.41% and it did not differ by orientation (89.84% for the horizontal block and 90.98% for the vertical block).

Among these Chinese-English bilinguals, 65% of them were faster in temporal judgment when the response key was arranged on a vertical axis ( M = 1269 ms, SD =

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546) than on a horizontal axis (M = 1526 ms, SD = 644), demonstrating a strong bias towards a vertical space-time mapping (vertical bias = 257 ms, paired-samples t-tests t (12) = 5.902, p = .000 ). The rest of bilinguals (7 out of 20) spent less time in the horizontal block (M = 1211 ms, SD = 436) than in the vertical block (M = 1425 ms, SD = 473; horizontal bias = 214 ms, paired-samples t-tests t (6) = -4.245, p = .005). The above results indicate that the number of Chinese - English bilinguals favoring a vertical thinking pattern for time is approximately twice that of bilinguals showing a horizontal bias for temporal reasoning.

As for linguistic factors concerning L2, the use frequency of English was found to correlate significantly with the amount of vertical bias (r = -.463, p = .040 < .05). In the questionnaire, participants were asked to list what percentage of the time they used each language (the percentages should add up to 100%). Based on their listed percentages of time, their scores on the use of frequency for each language were calculated on a scale from 0 to 100 (0 = never use, 100 = use all the time) ( mean use frequency of Chinese = 49, SD = 17.13; mean use frequency of English = 44.5, SD = 18.20; mean use frequency of languages other than Chinese and English = 6.5, SD = 16.9). As seen in Figure 2, the more frequently English was used, the less vertical bias one was likely to demonstrate. It appears that frequent contact with English can weaken the vertical space-time association in Chinese - English bilinguals’ minds. Table 3 shows that proficiency in English and the age of English acquisition did not predict a vertical bias. Although language contact is often assumed to have the function of developing language proficiency (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014, p. 971), proficiency in English was not significantly correlated with the use frequency of English in our sample ( r= .286, p= .222 >.05).

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Table 3

A series of Pearson correlations were done between vertical bias and other variables concerning L2 experience. Proficiency in English and age of English acquisition did not turn out statistically significant. Table 3 shows r values and p values.

Possible L2 factors in vertical bias r values p values

Use frequency of English -.463 .040

Proficiency in English -.194 .412

Age of English acquisition .171 .472

5.3 Discussion

Contrary to the prediction that Chinese - English bilinguals should favor the mental representation of time along a horizontal plane, the results showed that a majority of bilinguals displayed a strong tendency for a vertical space-time mapping and the

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frequency of using L2 English helped bilinguals shift towards less vertical thinking about time.

Experiment 2 found some evidence different from the previous study in which 80 % of Chinese - English bilinguals relied on the horizontal axis to represent time and only 20 % of them arranged time vertically (Yang & Sun, 2016). Divergences on the question of which is bilinguals’ favored thinking pattern about time in two studies might be partly due to different experimental paradigms. In Yang and Sun’s study (2016), participants were asked to arrange a set of cards in temporal order and all of them laid out cards either vertically or horizontally. In this task, the availability of the other space-time association was neglected in results because participants had to explicitly make a choice between two kinds of mappings in no time. In our experiment, bilinguals gave responses on horizontal and vertical axes. Their response times in two oriental conditions were compared to see which bias was reflected in their implicit space-time associations. There is a possibility that one arranges cards in one way but mentally represents time in the other way when measured implicitly. Another point worth noting in our experiment is that all participants did the horizontal block first and then the vertical block. As the task went on, participants got more familiar with the task requirement and might spend less time in making temporal judgement. Therefore, with the order of two blocks fixed, it is possible for participants to respond faster in the vertical block than in the earlier horizontal block, thus resulting in a vertical bias. However, we do not deem that vertical bias exhibited by 65% of bilinguals was brought about solely by the fixed order, because a correlation between vertical bias and the use frequency of English was found, which was independent of the order effect. To some extent, this indicated that our experiment indeed implicitly measured how bilinguals represented time despite an above confounding factor.

The proportion of bilinguals with vertical bias versus bilinguals with horizontal bias (65% vs 35%) did not accord with the linguistic observation that horizontal metaphors are used twice as frequently as vertical metaphors in Chinese (Chen, 2007). If spatial-temporal metaphors do shape habitual thinking about time, most of Chinese - English bilinguals should display a salient bias towards a horizontal space-time

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mapping as a result of propensity to use horizontal metaphors in Chinese and English. However, the result in Experiment 2 that the horizontal timeline only dominated one-third of bilinguals’ thinking pattern about time did not support the above assumption. So, what accounts for bilinguals with vertical bias outnumbering those with horizontal bias? There might be factors other than linguistic metaphors making Chinese-English bilinguals more likely to conceive of time as vertical. For example, in Chinese culture, time is believed to flow in a way analogous to water flow (Wang&Chen,2009). A river flows from upstream to downstream and time is considered to have the same movement direction as running water. Influenced by Chinese traditional view of time, Chinese speakers are more likely to arrange time from top to bottom. The vertical metaphors in Chinese and Chinese speakers’ traditional view of time go together and reinforce participants’ vertical representation of time.

The findings of Experiment 2 supported that certain aspect of L2 experience can play a role in affecting bilinguals’ mental representations of time. Participants with more frequent use of English were more likely to have less vertical bias than those self-reporting less amount of contact with English. Considering that English predominantly relies on horizontal metaphors to express time, the frequent usage of English might make bilinguals more exposed to horizontal spatial-temporal metaphors, which would strengthen their horizontal space-time mapping. In a similar study by Fuhrman et al. (2011), vertical time arrangement was predicted by proficiency in Chinese. However, no negative correlation between proficiency in English and vertical bias was found in this sample. Also, most of the participants reported acquiring English at the age of 7 or 8 when entering into primary school. As a consequence, the age of English acquisition in a fairly small range did not possibly emerge as a predictor of vertical bias. It would be necessary to test more bilinguals with different ages of English acquisition to verify Boroditsky’s findings (2001) that learning English at a younger age suggests a less vertical bias.

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6. General discussion

Through a response task, we assessed both short-term and long-term effects of spatial-temporal metaphors on Chinese - English bilinguals’ mental representations of time. The results from Experiment 1 confirmed an instant effect of spatial-temporal metaphors that bilinguals primed with horizontal metaphors in English were more likely to have a horizontal bias whereas bilinguals were more likely to have a vertical bias when prompted with vertical metaphors in Chinese. In Experiment 2, we found that a vertical thinking pattern for time was favored in a majority of bilinguals but the proportion of bilinguals exhibiting vertical bias and those with horizontal bias did not tally with the proportion of vertical and horizontal metaphors for time in Chinese. It appears that an immediate linguistic context created by spatial-temporal metaphors can determine which space-time mapping bilinguals put into use online, but spatial-temporal metaphors do not play a causal role in shaping habitual thinking about time in the long term.

Experiment 1 revealed that Chinese - English bilinguals had both vertical and horizontal timelines and were able to activate certain timeline which corresponded to the spatial metaphors they were primed with. Explicit spatial terms contained in metaphors for time can act as a spotlight to highlight certain space-time associations, thus leading people to spontaneously recruit the mental representation of time consistent with the properties of spatial-temporal metaphors. This result can also be explained by Casasanto’s theory of mental metaphor (2014). Instead of claiming that spatial-temporal metaphors are such a strong force to shape people’s temporal reasoning (e.g. the use of vertical metaphors in Chinese brings Chinese speakers a vertical timeline), we propose that people are born with multiple timelines and certain space-time mapping is consolidated every space-time corresponding spatial-temporal metaphors are used. Take English speakers as an example; previous empirical studies have demonstrated that English speakers only think about time horizontally and their horizontal bias can be predicted by the predominant use of horizontal metaphors in English (e.g. Boroditsky 2001; Fuhrman et al., 2011; Yang & Sun, 2016). After the frequent use of horizontal metaphors for time, the horizontal representation of time becomes the dominant space-time mapping in English speakers’ minds. However, it

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does not mean that space-time mappings other than the horizontal one will vanish. Other initial space-time mappings are retained and can be activated via the use of corresponding metaphors. As Boroditsky (2001) discovered in a training experiment, English speakers displayed a vertical bias after being trained to use vertical terms such as above/ below to describe time. Their flexible switch from a horizontal representation of time to a vertical one suggested that talking about time vertically after laboratory training can temporarily activate the vertical space-time mapping, which has been weakened and hidden as a result of using horizontal metaphors in English.

Now let us take a look at the Chinese - English bilinguals in our study. Given that both horizontal and vertical metaphors are systematically adopted to express time in Chinese, horizontal and vertical space-time mappings can be strengthened but compete with each other even before acquiring horizontal metaphors in English. When primed with vertical metaphors in an immediate context, bilinguals reinforced the vertical space-time mapping at the expense of the horizontal one as reflected by their strong vertical bias. For the same reason, horizontal metaphors in English primed bilinguals for a horizontal representation of time and led them to inhibit the vertical timeline. These results from Experiment 1 suggested that spatial-temporal metaphors can produce an immediate effect on people’s mental representations of time. The findings replicated the effect of an immediate linguistic context on online processing of time found in the previous work, where Lai and Boroditsky prompted Chinese speakers with vertical and horizontal metaphors in Chinese respectively and where Fuhrman et al. tested bilinguals either in English instructions or Chinese instructions (Lai & Boroditsky, 2013; Fuhrman et al., 2013). Nonetheless, judging from the favored thinking pattern for time in Experiment 2, a linguistic effect cannot sufficiently explain how people habitually conceptualize time.

To test for long-term effects of spatial-temporal metaphors, Experiment 2 used non-linguistic stimuli and its instructions were all in English without any spatial language to make sure the linguistic content was minimized. Interestingly, two-thirds of bilinguals displayed a vertical bias and one third a horizontal bias, which was just the opposite to the linguistic temporal observations in Chinese. It seems that linguistic metaphors in two languages do not play a decisive role in bilinguals’ temporal

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representations, otherwise most of the bilinguals should show a horizontal bias. This indirectly proves that space-time mappings cannot be merely shaped by linguistic variables. A growing body of evidence has revealed that extra-linguistic variables such as writing direction and cultural attitudes towards time can affect how people map time onto space, which might be taken into account to explain why more bilinguals favored a vertical thinking pattern in the present study (e.g. de la Fuente et al, 2014; Casasanto & Bottini, 2014). Experiment 2 also observed effects from long-term bilingual experience and found a negative correlation between the use frequency of English and vertical bias, suggesting that language can have an impact on people’s mental representations of time in the long run. The more frequent use of English appears to bring bilinguals more chance of using horizontal metaphors to strengthen their horizontal space-time mapping and weaken the vertical one. In terms of the L2 experience effect, the existing evidence suggested that age of acquisition and proficiency can affect how bilinguals conceptualize time (Boroditsky, 2001; Fuhrman et al., 2011).

Although there is lack of investigation into L2 use frequency in the previous studies on temporal representation, frequency of L2 use is considered to have a direct impact in other perceptual domains such as color and motion (e.g. Athanasopoulos, Damjanovic, Krajciova & Sasaki 2011; Bylund, Athanasopoulos & Oostendorp 2013). In a color similarity judgment task, Athanasopoulos et al. (2011) discovered that L1 Japanese – L2 English bilinguals with more frequent use of English than Japanese were more prone to resemble the judgement pattern of English monolinguals that lighter and darker shade of blue could not be distinguished. Likewise, bilinguals with more frequent use of Japanese in daily activities could judge two colors to be more distinct, as suggested by two linguistic categories for two kinds of blue in Japanese. These advanced bilinguals’ performance in judging the color blue fell in-between monolinguals speakers of Japanese and English and to which degree they were inclined to either monolingual pattern depended on their frequency of language usage (Athanasopoulos et al., 2011, p.14). Bylund et al. (2013) reported a similar effect of L2 use frequency on Afrikaans speakers’ motion event cognition. When matching a scene describing motion events with either an alternate of showing an endpoint or that of

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omitting an endpoint, speakers of Afrikaans, a language without grammatical aspects, matched with an endpoint alternate more frequently than English speakers who encoded aspectual differences grammatically (Bylund et al., 2013, p.948). Despite the difference in endpoint preferences between two groups, it was found that the more frequently Afrikaans used English, the more likely to exclude endpoint as English monolinguals did in non-linguistic motion event cognition. These studies demonstrated that L2 contact in daily life can modulate to which extent bilinguals represent concepts in an L2-like way.

Moreover, differences in grammatical or lexical categories between L1 and L2 are well-defined in above two studies, in the sense that English does not have two distinct color words to describe light and dark blue as Japanese has in Athanasopoulos et al.’s color study and English is an aspect language but Afrikaans is not in Bylund et al.’s study. In the present study, however, horizontal metaphors in Chinese overlap with those in English. Considering the predominant use of horizontal metaphors in English, the frequent use of English can lead to the strengthening of a horizontal space-time mapping and as a result, it makes bilinguals resemble English monolinguals’ horizontal thinking pattern about time, which is also linguistically preferred in Chinese. Although a majority of bilinguals in our study exhibited a preference for a vertical representation of time (associated with vertical metaphors in Chinese), frequency of English use can to some degree provide an explanation for their variation in temporal reasoning in two-dimensional space (e.g. horizontal bias vs vertical bias; more vs less vertical bias). To sum up, long-term L2 experience such as frequency of L2 use can serve as a linguistic cue for conceptual representations.

Of course, this study has potential limitations that need to be considered for further investigations. First, we only had a small number of participants in our experiments and the proportion of bilinguals preferring a horizontal or vertical representation of time might vary with sample size. Therefore, larger sample size is required to come to a more reliable conclusion about the dominant timeline in Chinese - English bilinguals’ minds. Second, most of the bilinguals in our study were university students and had a similar background in English education. It is recommended to recruit more bilinguals with varying L2 experience such as a wide range of the age of L2 acquisition so that the

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impact of bilingual experience on temporal cognition can be observed more comprehensively. If possible, the detailed information about the actual use frequency of spatial-temporal metaphors in each language can be collected from each participant to further prove an effect of linguistic metaphors and to see how the metaphor use is associated with L2 experience. Thirdly, due to the fixed order of two oriental conditions, with the horizontal block first, the result that some bilinguals responded faster along a vertical axis than along a horizontal axis may be an experimental artefact.

7. Conclusion

In this study, we tested for the effects of linguistic relativity in the abstract domain of time. In view of the priming effects of spatial terms or knowledge in the previous studies, it was predicted that bilinguals would represent time in a way consistent with the metaphors they read. The results from Experiment 1 confirmed an immediate and causal effect of spatial-temporal metaphors and extended such an effect to Chinese – English bilinguals. In addition to the short-term effect of spatial-temporal metaphors, we examined whether there were any long-term language effects brought by either use of spatial-temporal metaphors or L2 experience. By finding the dominant timeline in bilinguals’ minds, we were able to judge whether spatial-temporal metaphors can shape how time is conceptualized in the long run. If it does, then based on the proportion of horizontal and vertical metaphors in Chinese and English, Chinese – English bilinguals should prefer to represent time horizontally. However, the findings from Experiment 2 that most of the bilinguals showed a vertical bias failed to support this hypothesis. With regard to the impact of spatial-temporal metaphors, they are indeed a powerful force to affect people’s temporal reasoning in the moment but appear to be a less strong factor of shaping habitual thinking pattern about time. Nevertheless, Experiment 2 found a negative correlation between the frequency of English use and vertical bias, indicating a long-term effect of language on temporal representation. The present study contributes to the research on the relative impact of language on conceptual representations in bilinguals, but it still remains an empirical question of to what extent spatial-temporal metaphors affect space-time mappings, as the influence of linguistic metaphors on cognitive mechanisms can never be taken for granted.