Brief articleDo Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky (2001)☆,☆☆
Section snippets
Method
We searched the web news in Taiwan for the time expressions. In the first attempt, we downloaded 100 pieces of news from the Yahoo News Taiwan over four days. We, then, extracted all the expressions that contained time. The frequencies of the horizontal spatial terms and the vertical spatial terms were tallied. In the second attempt, we searched the Google News Taiwan, using the Chinese time words (day, week, month, season, and year) and the spatial terms (above, below, before, and after) as
Method
Twenty-five Chinese–English bilinguals from the Department of Foreign Languages, National Cheng Kung University participated. They were graduate students or at least in their undergraduate sophomore year, with an English major. Fourteen native speakers of English who taught English in Tainan City also participated. All of them were paid for participation.
There were 128 pictures serving as the primes. Half depicted a horizontal relation of two objects, while the other half the vertical relation.
General discussion
Boroditsky (2001) observed that whereas English monolinguals tended to think about time horizontally, Chinese–English bilinguals tended to think about time vertically even when they did it in English. She attributed this vertical bias in the Chinese–English bilinguals to the fact that the Chinese language uses the vertical spatial metaphors (in addition to the horizontal metaphor) to express time, while the English language uses only the horizontal metaphors. The author concluded that the
References (3)
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This manuscript was accepted under the editorship of Jacques Mehler.
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This work was sponsored by the NSC-93-2752-H-006-001-PAE grant awarded to the author by the National Council of Taiwan, ROC. It was carried out by Yi-Tien Tsai as part of the requirement for her master’s thesis.