To talk about time, English speakers often use horizontal spatial metaphors whereas Chinese speakers use both vertical and horizontal spatial metaphors. Boroditsky showed that while Chinese-English bilinguals were faster to verify a temporal target like June comes earlier than August after they had seen a vertical spatial prime rather than a horizontal spatial prime, English monolinguals showed the reverse pattern, thus supporting the linguistic relativity hypothesis. This finding was not conceptually replicated in January and Kako's six experiments for English monolinguals. (...) In the current experiment, we failed to conceptually replicate her English monolinguals' findings: both Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals were faster to verify the sentences after seeing a vertical spatial prime than a horizontal spatial prime. While we replicated Boroditsky's findings, in part, for our Chinese-English bilinguals, the similarity in the pattern of findings for both Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals argues against the linguistic relativity hypothesis. (shrink)

Can children’s handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right-handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left-handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box (...) on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good. Rather, right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. Results support the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), showing that children with different kinds of bodies think differently in corresponding ways. (shrink)

Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this paper we ask whether aspects of language and culture affect how people think about this domain. Specifically, we consider whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently. We review all of the available evidence both for and against this hypothesis, and report new data that further support and refine it. The results demonstrate that English and Mandarin speakers do think about time differently. As predicted by patterns in language, Mandarin speakers (...) are more likely than English speakers to think about time vertically (with earlier time-points above and later time-points below). (shrink)