Mental time travel and language enable us to go back and forth in time and to organize and express our personal experiences through time reference. People with Alzheimer’s disease have both mental time travel and time reference impairments, which can greatly impact their daily communication. Currently, little is known about the potential relationship between time conceptualization (i.e., mental time travel) and time reference difficulties in this disease. A systematic review of the literature was performed to determine if this link had (...) already been investigated. Only three articles integrated both time conceptualization and time reference measures. However, the link between the two was not systematically analyzed and interpreted. This review highlights the lack of research addressing the question of the influence of time conceptualization impairments in Alzheimer’s disease on other cognitive domains, and especially language. (shrink)

This study investigates how typological and metaphorical construal differences may affect the use and frequency of temporal expressions in English and Spanish. More precisely, we explore whether there are any differences between English, a satellite-framed language, and Spanish, a verb-framed language, in the use of certain temporal linguistic expressions that include a spatial, deictic component (Deictic Time), a purely temporal relation between two events (Sequential Time) or the expression of the duration of an event (Duration). To achieve this, we perform (...) two different types of studies. First, we conduct an informational gain or loss analysis of 1,650 of English-to-Spanish translations extracted from parallel corpora. Secondly, we compare the frequency of 33 English and 27 Spanish temporal expressions in two similar written online corpora (EnTenTen and EsTenTen, respectively) and a television news spoken corpus (NewsScape). Our results suggest that English uses “deictic expressions with directional language” (explicitly stating the spatial location of the temporal event, e.g., back in those days/in the future ahead ) much more frequently than Spanish, to the extent that such directional information is often excluded in English-to-Spanish translations. Also, sequential expressions (such as before that / later than ) and duration expressions ( during the whole day ) are much more frequent in Spanish. These usage differences, explained by the variability in motion typology and metaphoric construal, open up the interesting question of how these differences in linguistic usage could affect the conceptualization of time of English and Spanish speakers. (shrink)