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Does Mandarin spatial metaphor for time influence Chinese deaf signers’ spatio-temporal reasoning?

Gu,Yan
; 
Zheng,Yeqiu
; 
Swerts,Marc
Abstract
In Mandarin Chinese, the space-time word “前/qian” is used to express both the spatial concept of front/forward and the temporal concept of early/before (e.g., “前天/qian-tian”, literally front day, meaning the day before yesterday). This is consistent with the fact that Mandarin speakers can gesture to the front of the body to refer to a past event, and more generally can have past-in-front space-time mappings. In Chinese Sign Languages, however, the spatial front/forward and the temporal early/before are signed differently as the sign for spatial front is only used for the spatial concept of forward, and the sign for before/past is directed to the back. In this study we investigate whether the Mandarin sagittal spatial metaphors for time influence Chinese deaf signers’ spatio-temporal reasoning. In two experiments, we found that Chinese deaf signers with higher Mandarin proficiency were more likely to interpret the Mandarin word “前/qian” as the temporal conception of past (Study 1), and to perform past-in-front space-time mappings (Study 2) as opposed to signers with lower Mandarin proficiency. The findings of the study not only provide within-culture evidence for the influence of language on thought, but also demonstrate that even cross-modal space-time metaphors can have an impact on deaf-signers’ spatio-temporal reasoning.
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Date
2017
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Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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Gu, Y, Zheng, Y & Swerts, M 2017, Does Mandarin spatial metaphor for time influence Chinese deaf signers’ spatio-temporal reasoning? in G Gunzelmann, A Howes, T Tenbrink & E J Davelaar (eds), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society . Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society, pp. 445-450, cogsci 2017, London, United Kingdom, 26/07/17. < https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8e56/6a18ed68b6637a3d69440a28aab696893a39.pdf?_ga=2.221139736.107044358.1503152098-71770887.1503152098 >
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/21294
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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