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

Chen, Jenn Yeu

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.09.012

Cited by 149 publications

(106 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…For example, recent analyses of Mandarin corpora reveal that around 40% of time descriptions in Mandarin contain vertical metaphors (Chen, 2007).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work on this question has come up with some contradictory answers (Boroditsky, 2001;January & Kako, 2007;Chen, 2007). I will discuss these studies in detail in a separate paper.…”

Section: Do Patterns In Language Predict Patterns In Thought?mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Boroditsky, (2001) demonstrated that speakers of English and Mandarin think differently about time. This work has recently been brought into question (January & Kako, 2007;Chen, 2007). Here I present new evidence that again demonstrates a difference between English and Mandarin speakers' construals of time.…”

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confidence: 93%

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Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?

Boroditsky

2007

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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Do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Boroditsky, (2001) demonstrated that speakers of English and Mandarin think differently about time. This work has recently been brought into question (January & Kako, 2007;Chen, 2007). Here I present new evidence that again demonstrates a difference between English and Mandarin speakers' construals of time. Both languages use horizontal and vertical spatial language to talk about time. For example, in English we might say that the best is ahead of us, or we may move a meeting up. In English, vertical metaphors are relatively infrequent and horizontal metaphors predominate. In Mandarin, both horizontal and vertical metaphors are frequent. Importantly, vertical metaphors are much more frequent in Mandarin than they are in English. The new evidence once again suggests that Mandarin speakers don't just talk about time vertically more frequently than do English speakers, they also think about time vertically more frequently than do English speakers.

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“…For example, recent analyses of Mandarin corpora reveal that around 40% of time descriptions in Mandarin contain vertical metaphors (Chen, 2007).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work on this question has come up with some contradictory answers (Boroditsky, 2001;January & Kako, 2007;Chen, 2007). I will discuss these studies in detail in a separate paper.…”

Section: Do Patterns In Language Predict Patterns In Thought?mentioning

confidence: 97%

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Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?

Boroditsky

2007

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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“…Experimental evidence has reopened debate about the extent to which language influences nonlinguistic cognition in domains such as space (Levinson, 1996;Li & Gleitman, 2002;Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun, & Levinson, 2004), color (Gilbert, Regier, Kay, & Ivry, 2006;Kay & Kempton, 1984;Robertson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000;Witthoft, et al, 2003), number (Casasanto, 2005a;Gordon, 2004;Gelman & Gallistel, 2004;Miller, Major, Shu, & Zhang, 2000;Pica, Lemer, Izard, & Dehaene, 2004;Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001), and time (Boroditsky, 2001;Casasanto et al, 2004;Chen, 2007;January & Kako, 2007;Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). One obstacle to resolving this controversy has been devising truly nonlinguistic tests to evaluate how speakers of different languages perceive or remember their experiences, particularly in the more abstract conceptual domains such as time.…”

Section: Time In Language and Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought

Casasanto

2008

Time to Speak

133

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The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed. Yet, experimental evidence has reopened debate about the extent to which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time. In this article, I will first analyze an influential argument against the Whorfian hypothesis and show that its anti-Whorfian conclusion is in part an artifact of conflating two distinct questions: Do we think in language? and Does language shape thought? Next, I will discuss crosslinguistic differences in spatial metaphors for time and describe experiments that demonstrate corresponding differences in nonlinguistic mental representations. Finally, I will sketch a simple learning mechanism by which some linguistic relativity effects appear to arise. Although people may not think in language, speakers of different languages develop distinctive conceptual repertoires as a consequence of ordinary and presumably universal neural and cognitive processes.

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“…However, Chen (2007) Boroditsky (2001) adopted spatial priming paradigm. In this paradigm, the participants were asked to observe the objects in a horizontal or vertical array, and their reaction times to the temporal relationship judgments were recorded.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Vertical and Horizontal Spatial-Temporal Conceptual Metaphor Representation of Chinese Temporal Words

Hong¹,

He²,

Tillman³

et al. 2017

PSYCH

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People rely on spatial-temporal metaphor when they talk and think about abstract temporal concept. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the mechanism of the multi-dimensional spatial-temporal conceptual metaphor in Chinese. Using the spatial cuing paradigm, we examined the cognitive impact of the Chinese vertical and horizontal spatial-temporal metaphor, and explored the dominant dimension between the two metaphors in context. The results showed that the processing of temporal concepts for Chinese speakers involved not only the horizontal spatial-temporal metaphor, but also the vertical spatial-temporal metaphor. The horizontal dimension was the dominant dimension of spatial-temporal metaphor in the processing of temporal concepts in Chinese. The findings demonstrated that representation of time depends on representation of space, supporting the Metaphorical Structuring View.

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

Cited by 149 publications

References 2 publications

Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?

Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought

The Vertical and Horizontal Spatial-Temporal Conceptual Metaphor Representation of Chinese Temporal Words

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