Mental Time-Lines Follow Writing Direction: Comparing English and Hebrew Speakers

Mental Time-Lines Follow Writing Direction: Comparing English and Hebrew Speakers Orly Fuhrman (orlyfu@psych.stanford.edu) Lera Boroditsky (lera@psych.stanford.edu) Department of Psychology, Stanford University Jordan Hall, Bldg. 420, Stanford, CA 94043 Abstract Across cultures people construct spatial representations of time. However, the particular spatial layout created to represent time differs across cultures. Previous work suggests that writing direction (e.g., left to right as in English, or right to left as in Arabic) can have an effect on how people mentally lay out time. The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1. Our study examines whether people automatically access spatial representations when they reason about temporal order, and 2. whether culturo-linguistic artifacts such as writing direction affect which spatial representations are likely to be automatically accessed. We asked Hebrew and English speakers to make temporal order judgments about pairs of pictures (i.e., to decide whether a picture represented an event ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ than the one depicted in another picture). Subjects made a response using two adjacent keyboard keys. English speakers were faster to make “earlier” judgments when the “earlier” response needed to be made with the left response key than with the right response key. Hebrew speakers (who read from right to left) showed exactly the reverse pattern. It appears that people do automatically access spatial information when making temporal order judgments, and the kind of spatial layout people mentally create for time differs depending on culturo-linguistic artifacts. Keywords: reading directionality, space, time, SNARC. Introduction Spatial representations of time are ubiquitous around the world. People use graphs and spatial time-lines, clocks, sundials, hourglasses, and calendars to represent time. In language, time is also heavily related to space, with spatial terms often used to describe the order and duration of events (Clark, 1973; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lehrer, 1990; Traugott, 1978). In English, for example, we might move a meeting forward, push a deadline back, attend a long concert or go on a short break. Further, people also represent time spatially in spontaneous co-speech gesture (e.g., Casasanto & Lozano, 2006; Nunez & Sweetser, 2006). Further, people appear to access spatial representations when processing temporal language (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Torralbo, Santiago , et al., 2006; Nunez, R., Motz, B., & U. Teuscher, U., 2006). Even simple temporal judgments like reproducing short durations are affected by spatial information (e.g., Casasanto and Boroditsky, 2007). While it may be a universal that spatial representations are used for time, languages and cultures differ in terms of how time is laid out in space. For example, Nunez & Sweetser (2006) observed that the Aymara talk about the future as being behind them and the past as being ahead of them, and gesture accordingly. English and Mandarin differ in terms of how often they talk about time vertically, with Mandarin speakers being much more likely to use vertical metaphors for time than do English speakers (Chun, 1997a; Chun, 1997b; Scott, 1989). Another way in which languages and cultures differ is in terms of writing direction. Previous studies have found that writing direction affects the way people graphically lay out time (Tversky, Kugelmass, and Winter, 1991). English speaking participants (who read from left to right) spontaneously mapped a sequence of events (such as the meals of the day) onto a horizontal line directed rightward, placing earlier events to the left and later events to the right. In contrast, Arabic speakers (who read from right to left) showed the reverse pattern, placing earlier events further to the right, and later events further to the left. Recently, Casasanto & Lozano (2006) have shown that even when not confined to a two-dimensional surface like a computer screen or a tabletop, English speakers use the horizontal left to right axis when they tell stories, by spontaneously gesturing to the left when referring to the past, and to the right when talking about the future. Beyond reasoning about time, people show a directional bias congruent with the writing direction of their language in perceptual exploration, drawing, and aesthetic preferences (e.g., Nachshon, 1985; Nachshon, Argaman, & Luria, 1999; Tversky, Kugelmass, & Winter, 1991). Imagery and sentence representation also seem to be modulated by writing direction; For example, Maass and Russo (2003), showed that while Italian speakers represent sentences in drawing from left-to-write, positioning the subject of the sentence to the left of the object, Arabic speakers show a reversal of this directional bias, representing the subject of the sentence to the right of the object. Writing direction has also been found to affect numerical reasoning. Speakers of languages like English and French that are written from left to right have been shown to represent numbers spatially on a ‘mental number line’ along which numbers are positioned from left to right according to their increasing magnitude (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993). Accordingly, speakers of languages written left-right show spatial compatibility effects when responding to numbers, with faster reaction times to small numbers using the left hand and faster reaction times to large numbers using the right hand (Dehaene et al., 1993; Bachtold, Baumuller, & Brugger, 1998).