Left-right coding of past and future in language: the mental timeline during sentence processing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Metaphoric mapping theory posits abstract concepts like time are understood via concrete spatial dimensions.
• Research across psychophysics, linguistics, and cultural studies supports this theory, particularly response time studies.
• Congruency effects between time and space dimensions suggest evoked spatial representations impact temporal word processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the congruency effect between time and space during sentence processing.
• To examine how participants mentally represent past and future concepts in relation to spatial responses.
• To determine the automaticity of time-space associations in sentence comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Three linguistic experiments were conducted using sentence processing tasks.
• Participants responded to past- and future-related sentences with left- or right-hand responses.
• Response times were measured to assess congruency effects, with additional tasks to probe automaticity.

Main Results:

• A significant congruency effect was observed: left-hand responses for past-related sentences and right-hand for future-related sentences yielded faster response times.
• This indicates participants formed mental time-space associations, aligning with a left-to-right representation of time.
• Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that these time-space associations are not automatically activated during non-temporal meaning discrimination tasks.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the metaphoric mapping theory, suggesting a left-to-right mental representation of time.
• Sentence processing involves forming associations between temporal concepts and spatial dimensions.
• The activation of these associations is context-dependent and not fully automatic, influenced by task demands.