Whether Chinese Speakers Think about Time More Vertically Depends on their Immediate and Lifetime Experience of Reading Horizontal or Vertical Texts: Evidence from Contextual Priming

Whether Chinese Speakers Think about Time More Vertically Depends on their Immediate and Lifetime Experience of Reading Horizontal or Vertical Texts: Evidence from Contextual Priming Jenn-Yeu Chen (PSYJYC@NTNU.EDU.TW) Michael Friederich (MICHAEL_TAIWAN_AG@YAHOO.COM) Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University 162 Heping East Road Section 1, Taipei, Taiwan 106 Hua Shu (SHUH@BNU.EDU.CN) National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University 19 Xinjiehouwai Street, Beijing, China 100875 Abstract Do Chinese speakers think about time vertically because they use vertical spatial metaphors to express time? Inconsistent findings have been reported even when the same paradigms were used. The present study examined participants’ performance on a temporal judgment task while holding language constant but varying their lifetime and immediate reading experience of horizontal and vertical texts. Chinese participants from Taiwan and China were randomly assigned to a reading task involving horizontally or vertically arranged texts (contextual primes). A temporal judgment task (spatial-temporal association of response codes or STARC) followed the reading task, asking the participants to judge if the event depicted in a second picture occurred earlier or later than that in a first picture. Responses were faster when the left keys represented the ‘earlier’ responses than when the right keys did, representing a STARC effect. Half of the participants responded with horizontally oriented keys while the rest with vertically oriented keys. For the Taiwan participants, the overall STARC effect was greater when the response keys were vertical than horizontal, but no difference was observed for the China participants. A questionnaire indicates that the two groups of participants had similar lifetime experiences of reading horizontal texts, but the Taiwan participants read vertical texts in their life far more frequently than the China participants. Immediate reading experiences interacted with lifetime experiences in modulating the vertical bias. For the Taiwan participants, the vertical bias was strong following the vertical prime, but disappeared following the horizontal prime. For the China participants, the horizontal prime led to no vertical bias whereas the vertical prime brought about a horizontal bias. We conclude that the directionality of orthography and speakers’ immediate and lifetime reading experiences, rather than the use of vertical spatial metaphors, can better explain the vertical bias (or the lack of it) in the Chinese speakers. Keywords: linguistic relativity; temporal reasoning; reading direction Introduction Once denounced as scientifically unsound (Devitt and Sterelny, 1987; Pinker, 1994), the linguistic relativity hypothesis has regained much attention in the past two decades. The essence of the hypothesis is that the particular linguistic form in a language can shape the habitual way of thinking by the speakers of the language (Whorf, 1956; Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). For example, if language A does not distinguish two shades of blue whereas language B does, speakers of language A would not be able to tell apart the two shades of blue as easily as speakers of language B (Davidoff, Davies, & Roberson, 1999; Gilbert, Regier, Kay, & Ivry, 2006; Winawer et al., 2007). Similarly, if language A does not encode the biological gender lexically whereas language B does, the gender information would become less accessible to speakers of language A than speakers of language B (Chen & Su, 2011). In the temporal domain, it has been observed that Chinese speakers seem to conceptualize time continuously and maintain an “extended present” view that encompasses recent past and near future, whereas English speakers tend to maintain a relatively discrete view of time with distinct present, past and future. This cross-linguistic difference has been attributed to the use of explicit tense and aspect markers in English and the lack of them in Chinese (Chen, Su, Lee, & O’Seaghdha, 2012; Chen, Su, & O’Seaghdha, 2013). While much of recent empirical work has produced evidence consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, there were controversies due to inconsistent findings as well. One particular controversy comes from the study of spatial metaphors of time. An early study employing a spatial priming paradigm found that the frequent use of vertical spatial metaphors to express time in Chinese led to a vertical bias in the Chinese speakers’ conception of time whereas the rare use of such metaphors in English led to a horizontal bias in the English speakers (Boroditsky, 2001). However, subsequent studies were unable to confirm such a differential bias (Chen, 2007; January & Kako, 2007; Tse & Altarriba, 2008; Sanvido, de Rose, & Chen, 2011). More recently, a SNARC-like paradigm (spatial-numerical association of response codes, Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993) applied to temporal processing (spatial-temporal association of response codes or STARC) detected a similar vertical bias in the Chinese speakers relative to the English speakers (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2011; Fuhrman et al., 2011; Miles, Tan, Noble, Lumsden, & Macrae, 2011). In a STARC task, the participants saw two photographs of an event and had to determine if the second photograph