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Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time
Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time
(Summary of Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought? English and Mandarin speakers' conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1-22.)
“Does the language you speak shape the way you understand the world.” We know from our experience and observations that different languages express the same idea or talk about the same physical notion in a slightly different way. But does this mean that speakers of different languages view or perceive the word in a slightly different way. Is there any deterministic influence on the way of thinking owing its origin to the structure of language? Various studies have been done in the past 50 years to answer this question, but a definite answer has yet to be found. Lera Boroditsky mentions certain inherent flaws with any such study which tries to find out the ‘influential’ relationship between language and thought. These studies cannot tell us whether experience with a language affects language-independent thought such as thought for other languages or thought in non-linguistic tasks. Further, simply comparing studies conducted in different languages is also of not much use because there is simply no way to be certain that the stimuli and instructions are truly the same in both languages. To give instruction in two different languages defies the fundamental assumption of the studies that two different language make people think differently as to how can one say that the set of instructions given in two different language conveyed ‘exactly’ the same message.
Dr Boroditsky suggests that proving that language influences thought in some broader sense would require observing a cross-linguistic difference on some implicit measure such as ‘reaction time’ in a non-language-specific task. She explains the fact that English and Mandarin speakers talk about time differently —English predominantly uses horizontal metaphors for time, such as ‘good time ahead of us or the hardships behindus’; where as in Mandarin not only the spatial front-back (horizontal) metaphors are used, the vertical metaphors like ‘up and down’ are also common. Mandarin speakers systematically use vertical metaphors to talk about the order of events, weeks, months, semesters, and more. Earlier events are above or higher than and later events are below or lower than.
Boroditsky then argues that our experience dictates that time is a phenomenon in which we, the observer, experience continuous unidirectional change that may be marked by the appearance and disappearance of objects and events. Now these aspects of time-perception should be universal across cultures and languages and it is supported by the fact that almost all known languages import those spatial terms to talk about time which are one-dimensional and directional such as ahead/behind or up/down rather than multidimensional or symmetric terms such as narrow/wide orleft/right. Aspects of time which are extractable from world experience (temporally bounded events, unidirectional change, etc) appear to be universal across cultures and languages. Now there are many aspects of our concept of time that are not observable in the world. E.g., does time move vertically or horizontally, forward or backward, left or right, up or down? Does it move past us or we move through it. We can not experience these in the physical world but our language will somehow categorize this for us— most often through spatial metaphors. And a survey of languages does suggest that across languages people use spatial metaphors to talk about time.
Boroditsky now returns to the basic question: do the differences between the English and Mandarin ways of talking about time lead to differences in how their speakers think about time. First she talks about the short-term and long-term implications for online processing. Her previous study (Boroditsky 2000) suggested that spatial priming resulted in a biased interpretation of an ambiguous question about time. Further, spatial primes (March comes before April) and temporal primes (March comes earlier than April) yielded almost similar results from subjects who were answering questions about time suggesting that spatial primes provided as much useful information as the pure temporal primes. Thus, it appears that spatiotemporal metaphors do have implications for online conceptual processing.
She then turns towards the question of long-term implications. Previous studies by Boroditsky (2000) and Genter & Wolff (1997) have suggested that language-encouraged mapping between space and time may then be stored in the domain of time. Now these frequently invoked mappings may become habits of thought, forcing English speakers to think about time horizontally even when they are not explicitly processing a spatiotemporal metaphor. Similarly Mandarin speaker might grow to think about time vertically. To prove this Boroditsky conducts three experiments.
The first experiment tests whether using spatial metaphors to talk about time can have both immediate and long-term implications for how people think about time. In this experiment English and Mandarin speakers were asked to answer a target question about time, but before the target question they were asked to answer spatial priming questions which involved either horizontal spatial relations or vertical spatial relations (see below). All the answers were in the form of TRUE/FALSE and the reaction time was calculated for the target questions. Half of the target questions involved spatiotemporal metaphor (before/after) and the other half used temporal metaphors (earlier/later). All questions were asked in English.
Horizontal Spatial Prime (1a)
Vertical Spatial Prime (1b)
Now if the horizontal spatiotemporal metaphors are processed by activating horizontal spatial knowledge, then people should be faster to understand such a metaphor if they have just seen a horizontal spatial prime (fig 1a) than if they have just seen a vertical spatial prime (fig 1b). Since English and Mandarin both predominantly use horizontal metaphors for time, both speakers should be faster in answering the spatiotemporal questions after horizontal prime. The results confirmed this. It proved that spatial priming influenced the processing of spatiotemporal metaphors in the short-run.
However, both English and Mandarin speakers yielded different results for temporal questions. As predicted, English speakers were faster after horizontal primes than after vertical primes. However, Mandarin speakers were faster after vertical primes than after horizontal primes. This pattern was predicted by the fact that in Mandarin vertical metaphors are often used to talk about time. The fact that Mandarin speakers showed a vertical bias in thinking about time even when they were thinking in English shows that language must play an important role in shaping speakers’ thinking habits.
The experiment confirmed that native Mandarin and native English speakers were thinking differently about time. The English speakers were faster to confirm that ‘March comes earlier than April’ after horizontal primes then after vertical primes. This habit of thinking about time horizontally was predicted by the preponderance of horizontal spatial metaphors used to talk about time. The opposite was true of Mandarin speakers who were faster to confirm that ‘March comes earlier than April’ after vertical primes than horizontal primes. The habit of thinking about time vertically was predicted by the preponderance of vertical time metaphors in the Mandarin proving that habits in language promote habits in thinking even when one is not thinking in the native language.
The results from the first experiment showed that language can shape the way people think. However, it didn’t shed any light on how much and in what ways learning a new language can influence one’s way of thinking. The second experiment looked forward to further testing the relationship between language experience and patterns of thinking by testing Mandarin-English bilinguals in similar tasks as to those in the first experiment. All the subjects started learning English at a different stage in their lives. The underlying assumption that the experiment wanted to validate was that if learning new languages influences one’s way of thinking than the subjects who started learning English at an earlier stage in their lives would exhibit less ‘Mandarin’ bias to think about time vertically. The results confirmed that those who started learning English at an earlier stage in their lives gave less vertically biased answers, as compared to those who learnt English at a later stage in their lives. There appeared to be a systematic increase in the rate of vertically biased answers which corresponded directly to the difference in the age when they stared learning English. The Age of Acquisition of English was positively correlated with Vertical Bias. These finding bear a striking similarity to those put forward by Johnson and Newport (1989) showing a direct relationship between the grammatical proficiency and the age of acquisition. It is striking to note that the acquisition of semantic biases (here measured as Vertical Bias) is affected by the same variables as the acquisition of basic language skills like grammatical proficiency. In general, the later in their life they learned English, they more likely they were to think about time vertically. Further this tendency to think about time vertically was related to the duration of pure Mandarin experience and not to the length of exposure to English.
At this point Boroditsky questions the validity of above experiments and considers some other influences which might have lead to those results in the above mentioned experiments. Has this resulting difference in the patterns of thinking anything to do with the fact that English is written horizontally (left to right) and Mandarin is traditionally written in vertical columns that run from right to left? Other cultural difference might also have played a role. To eliminate the possibility of any influence from other cultural differences the third experiment was designed to minimize differences in non-linguistic cultural factors while preserving the interesting differences in language.
In this experiment native English speakers were first trained in vertical spatial terms (above, below, higher than, and lower than) to talk about time. It aimed to temporarily alter the English speakers’ habit of thinking about time horizontally. After their initial training the speakers were then presented with the same tasks as those in Experiment 1. Now if the English speakers who have just been trained to think like Mandarin speakers come up with results which are similar to those of native Mandarin speakers it would confirm that even in the absence of cultural differences, differences in talking do indeed lead to differences in thinking. The experiment showed the obvious differences between the untrained (the English speakers in Experiment 1) and the trained (the English speakers in Experiment 3) speakers. Unlike untrained speakers, trained speakers in third experiment were not faster in answering questions after horizontal primes. Rather, just like Mandarin speakers their response time was affected differently for different target questions. For spatiotemporal expressions (before/after) the response time was shorter after horizontal primes than after vertical primes. For purely temporal (earlier/later) target questions the pattern was exactly reversed and just like Mandarin speakers. They were faster in answering purely temporal questions after vertical primes than after horizontal primes. The only difference between the trained English speakers in Experiment 3 and the Mandarin speaker in experiment 1 was that English speakers were a little faster in answering the questions. However, this may not be of much interest for the current experiment. The important thing is that none of the differences observed between English and Mandarin speakers in Experiment 1 were present after English speakers had been trained to talk about time in a ‘Mandarin’ way. It confirmed that pure linguistic differences without any cultural or social interference can lead to differences in thinking.
Now what are the areas of world perception which are more ‘vulnerable’ in the sense that one language may categorize them differently which might eventually lead to differences in thinking while using another language? Why is it that Rosch et all’s study on colour perception came with totally opposite results showing that there are no differences in thinking of people of two languages even thought the vocabulary for colours varies quite a lot. There’s no definite answer to this. Boroditsky suggest that may be children’s perception of colour predates their understanding of time. Another possibility is that language is most powerful in determining thoughts of domains that are more abstract. Gentner and Boroditsky (2001) have argued that abstract conceptualizations which are commonly encoded by verbs and spatial propositions are more likely to be treated differently across languages than objects like nouns. Learning a relational concept which can not be explained by pointing to a physical object or event in the world will require an explanation in the language. Here the structure and relations and mappings which are permitted by the language play a crucial role. Other studies have confirmed that children take longer to learn relational terms than object-reference terms for the obvious reason of knowing more language in order to comprehend a relational concept. Another consequence is that the lexicalization of abstract and relational concepts varies cross-linguistically much more than that of concrete object concepts. It appears that acquiring abstract concepts requires experience with language and that the eventual form of these concepts is largely shaped by the language experience.
In this case spatial metaphors can provide relational structure for those aspects of time which can not be differentiated in the physical experience of the world. This results in importing the relational structure of space for the domain of time which is stored in the time-domain and eventually results in using (in other words forcibly, but unconsciously, imposing) physical spatial structures on an abstract notion.
(October 2005)
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