Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 104, Issue 2, August 2007, Pages 427-436
Cognition

Brief article
Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky (2001),☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2006.09.012Get rights and content

Abstract

English uses the horizontal spatial metaphors to express time (e.g., the good days ahead of us). Chinese also uses the vertical metaphors (e.g., ‘the month above’ to mean last month). Do Chinese speakers, then, think about time in a different way than English speakers? Boroditsky [Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1–22] claimed that they do, and went on to conclude that ‘language is a powerful tool in shaping habitual thought about abstract domains’ (such as time). By estimating the frequency of usage, we found that Chinese speakers actually use the horizontal spatial metaphors more often than the vertical metaphors. This offered no logical ground for Boroditsky’s claim. We were also unable to replicate her experiments in four different attempts. We conclude that Chinese speakers do not think about time in a different way than English speakers just because Chinese also uses the vertical spatial metaphors to express time.

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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    Boroditsky (2001, 2008) proposed that Mandarin Chinese speakers preferentially conceptualize time on the vertical axis as a result of its prevalence in linguistic metaphorical usage. An analysis of news corpora in Mandarin Chinese by Chen (2007: 429) demonstrated, however, that horizontal axis temporal expressions were significantly more frequent than vertical axis temporal expressions, although the analysis did not distinguish sagittal from lateral horizontal expressions. Ding et al. (2020)'s congruence study, as well as suggesting a possible different mechanism for lateral axis mapping than for the other two axes, found an advantage for the vertical axis over the sagittal axis.

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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.

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