{"pk":26863,"title":"Does Mandarin Spatial Metaphor for Time Influence Chinese Deaf Signers’\nSpatio-Temporal Reasoning?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In Mandarin Chinese, the space-time word “前/qian” is\nused to express both the spatial concept of front/forward\nand the temporal concept of early/before (e.g., “前天/qian-\ntian”, literally front day, meaning the day before yesterday).\nThis is consistent with the fact that Mandarin speakers can\ngesture to the front of the body to refer to a past event, and\nmore generally can have past-in-front space-time mappings.\nIn Chinese Sign Languages, however, the spatial\nfront/forward and the temporal early/before are signed\ndifferently as the sign for spatial front is only used for the\nspatial concept of forward, and the sign for before/past is\ndirected to the back. In this study we investigate whether\nthe Mandarin sagittal spatial metaphors for time influence\nChinese deaf signers’ spatio-temporal reasoning. In two\nexperiments, we found that Chinese deaf signers with\nhigher Mandarin proficiency were more likely to interpret\nthe Mandarin word “前/qian” as the temporal conception of\npast (Study 1), and to perform past-in-front space-time\nmappings (Study 2) as opposed to signers with lower\nMandarin proficiency. The findings of the study not only\nprovide within-culture evidence for the influence of\nlanguage on thought, but also demonstrate that even cross-\nmodal space-time metaphors can have an impact on deaf-\nsigners’ spatio-temporal reasoning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"space and time; Chinese deaf signers; language\nand thought; conceptual metaphor"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qq1f3rp","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tilburg University","department":""},{"first_name":"Yeqiu","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zheng","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tilburg University","department":""},{"first_name":"Marc","middle_name":"","last_name":"Swerts","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tilburg University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26863/galley/16499/download/"}]}