According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, people’s sagittal mental space-time mappings are conditioned by their temporal-focus attention. Based on this, it can be predicted that, by virtue of their future-oriented thinking, individuals with high anxiety should be more likely to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping than those with low anxiety. Utilizing a combined correlational and experimental approach, we found converging evidence for this prediction. Studies 1 and 2 found that individuals higher in dispositional anxiety and state anxiety, (...) who characteristically worry about the future, were more likely to conceptualize the future as in front of them and the past as behind than individuals lower in dispositional anxiety and state anxiety. Study 3 showed that participants who were induced with anxiety mood tended to map the future on a frontal position, compared to those in the baseline condition. These findings shed further light on the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, thus providing the first experimental evidence that emotional experience can influence people’s temporal-focus attention in determining their metaphorical sagittal orientation of time. (shrink)

This study recruited English monolinguals, Mandarin monolinguals, and Mandarin–English bilinguals to examine whether native English and native Mandarin speakers think about time differently and whether the acquisition of L2 English could reshape native Mandarin speakers’ mental representations of temporal sequence. Across two experiments, we used the temporal congruency categorization paradigm which involved two-alternative forced-choice reaction time tasks to contrast experimental conditions that were assumed to be either compatible or incompatible with the internal spatiotemporal associations. Results add to previous studies by (...) confirming that native English and native Mandarin speakers do think about time differently, and the significant crosslinguistic discrepancy primarily lies in the vertical representations of time flow. However, current findings also clarify the existing literature, demonstrating that the acquisition of L2 English does not appear to affect native Mandarin speakers’ temporal cognition. ME bilinguals, irrespective of whether they attained elementary or advanced level of English proficiency, exhibited temporal thinking patterns commensurate with those of Mandarin monolinguals. Some theoretical implications regarding the effect of bilingualism on cognition in general can be drawn from the present study, a crucial one being that it provides evidence against the view that L2 acquisition can reshape habitual modes of thinking established by L1. (shrink)

The current paper presents two experiments investigating the effect of presence versus absence of compulsory number marking in a native language on a speaker's ability to recall number information from photos. In Experiment 1, monolingual English and Japanese adults were shown a sequence of 110 photos after which they were asked questions about the photos. We found that the English participants showed a significantly higher accuracy rate for questions testing recall for number information when the correct answer was “2” (instead (...) of “1”) than Japanese participants. In Experiment 2, English and Japanese adults engaged in the same task as in Experiment 1 with an addition that explored reasons for the results found in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 2 were in line with the results of Experiment 1, but also suggested that the results could not be attributed to differences in guessing patterns between the two groups or the type of linguistic constructions used in the test situations. The current study suggests that native language affects speakers' ability to recall number information from scenes and thus provides evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers’ co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of higher pitches (...) to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations. (shrink)