Spatialization of time in Mian

We examine representations of time among the Mianmin of Papua New Guinea. We begin by describing the patterns of spatial and temporal reference in Mian. Mian uses a system of spatial terms that derive from the orientation and direction of the Hak and Sek rivers and the surrounding landscape. We then report results from a temporal arrangement task administered to a group of Mian speakers. The results reveal evidence for a variety of temporal representations. Some participants arranged time with respect to their bodies (left to right or toward the body). Others arranged time as laid out on the landscape, roughly along the east/west axis (either east to west or west to east). This absolute pattern is consistent both with the axis of the motion of the sun and the orientation of the two rivers, which provides the basis for spatial reference in the Mian language. The results also suggest an increase in left-to-right temporal representations with increasing years of formal education (and the reverse pattern for absolute spatial representations for time). These results extend previous work on spatial representations for time to a new geographical region, physical environment, and linguistic and cultural system

Time in the mind: Using space to think about time

How do we construct abstract ideas like justice, mathematics, or time-travel? In this paper we investigate whether mental representations that result from physical experience underlie people’s more abstract mental representations, using the domains of space and time as a testbed. People often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a long vacation, a short concert). Do people also think about time using spatial representations, even when they are not using language? Results of six psychophysical experiments revealed that people are unable to ignore irrelevant spatial information when making judgments about duration, but not the converse. This pattern, which is predicted by the asymmetry between space and time in linguistic metaphors, was demonstrated here in tasks that do not involve any linguistic stimuli or responses. These findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time observed in language also exists in our more basic representations of distance and duration. Results suggest that our mental representations of things we can never see or touch may be built, in part, out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action

Reversing the direction of time: Does the visibility of spatial representations of time shape temporal focus?

While people around the world mentally represent time in terms of space, there is substantial cross-cultural variability regarding which temporal constructs are mapped onto which parts in space. Do particular spatial layouts of time – as expressed through metaphors in language – shape temporal focus? We trained native English speakers to use spatiotemporal metaphors in a way such that the flow of time is reversed, representing the future behind the body (out of visible space) and the past ahead of the body (within visible space). In a task measuring perceived relevance of past events, people considered past events and present (or immediate past) events to be more relevant after using the reversed metaphors compared to a control group that used canonical metaphors spatializing the past behind and the future ahead of the body (Experiment 1). In a control measure in which temporal information was removed, this effect disappeared (Experiment 2). Taken together, these findings suggest that the degree to which people focus on the past may be shaped by the visibility of the past in spatiotemporal metaphors used in language

Constructing Agency: The Role of Language

Is agency a straightforward and universal feature of human experience? Or is the construction of agency (including attention to and memory for people involved in events) guided by patterns in culture? In this paper we focus on one aspect of cultural experience: patterns in language. We examined English and Japanese speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events. English and Japanese speakers described intentional events similarly, using mostly agentive language (e.g., “She broke the vase”). However, when it came to accidental events English speakers used more agentive language than did Japanese speakers. We then tested whether these different patterns found in language may also manifest in cross-cultural differences in attention and memory. Results from a non-linguistic memory task showed that English and Japanese speakers remembered the agents of intentional events equally well. However, English speakers remembered the agents of accidents better than did Japanese speakers, as predicted from patterns in language. Further, directly manipulating agency in language during another laboratory task changed people’s eye-witness memory, confirming a possible causal role for language. Patterns in one’s linguistic environment may promote and support how people instantiate agency in context

‘She says, he says’: Does the sex of an instructor interact with the grammatical gender of targets in a perspective-taking task?

Aims and objectives: It has been claimed that grammatical gender can influence the perception of objects as being potentially more ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. The present study investigated effects of facilitation or interference on object selection by speakers whose L1 marks grammatical gender even when selecting objects in an L2 (English) which does not mark grammatical gender. Additionally, and in order to establish whether bilingualism itself influenced performance owing to a proposed bilingual advantage in inhibitory control, we investigated whether bilinguals would be more efficient than monolinguals at taking the allocentric perspective and switching between perspectives. Methodology: Participants were asked to select objects by an instructor whose biological sex (and voice) was either congruent or incongruent with the grammatical gender of the object to be selected. Two groups of 16 bilinguals each were recruited on the basis of whether their L1s marked for grammatical gender or not, and a further group of 16 monolingual English speakers were tested as a control. Data and analysis: Groups were compared by means of mixed-design repeated measures ANOVAs with response times for target selections as the dependent variables. Findings: When tested in English, bilinguals whose L1 marked grammatical gender showed no effect of gender congruency in this task, nor did bilinguals outperform monolinguals in taking the allocentric perspective or in perspective switching. Originality: For the first time, potential grammatical gender effects were investigated on a task where the fast and accurate processing of real male and female voices is fundamental to the efficiency of object selection performance. Implications: The present findings are interpreted as evidence that the effects of L1 grammatical gender on tasks performed in an L2 do not extend to tasks where the link between biological sex and grammatical gender is not made explicit. </jats:sec

Your space or mine? : Mapping self in time

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make “well-informed” decisions. Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems: differences that are larger, for example, than pre-existing differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans

Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity

Participants read aloud swear words, euphemisms of the swear words, and neutral stimuli while their autonomic activity was measured by electrodermal activity. The key finding was that autonomic responses to swear words were larger than to euphemisms and neutral stimuli. It is argued that the heightened response to swear words reflects a form of verbal conditioning in which the phonological form of the word is directly associated with an affective response. Euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger (the offending word form) by another word form that expresses a similar idea. That is, word forms exert some control on affect and cognition in turn. We relate these findings to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and suggest a simple mechanistic account of how language may influence thinking in this context

Higher Height, Higher Ability: Judgment Confidence as a Function of Spatial Height Perception

Based on grounded cognition theories, the current study showed that judgments about ability were regulated by the subjects' perceptions of their spatial height. In Experiment 1, we found that after seeing the ground from a higher rather than lower floor, people had higher expectations about their performance on a knowledge test and assigned themselves higher rank positions in a peer comparison evaluation. In Experiment 2, we examined the boundary conditions of the spatial height effects and showed that it could still occur even if we employed photos rather than actual building floors to manipulate the perceptions of spatial heights. In addition, Experiment 2 excluded processing style as an explanation for these observations. In Experiment 3, we investigated a potential mechanism for the spatial height effect by manipulating the scale direction in the questionnaire. Consequently, consistent with our representational dependence account, the effect of spatial heights on ability judgments was eliminated when the mental representation of ability was disturbed by a reverse physical representation. These results suggest that people's judgments about their ability are correlated with their spatial perception

Flexing gender perception:Brain potentials reveal the cognitive permeability of grammatical information

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition, however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a non-verbal categorization task, French-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French-English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception