汉语背景下左右走向的心理时间线

A Left-to-right Mental Timeline in Chinese Context

探讨汉语背景下是否存在左右走向的心理时间线。实验一,被试通过左右手按键对时间词进行分类。实验二,被试在时间词线索下完成左或右圆点的定位任务。结果发现:(1)过去意义词呈现在左边或左手反应时反应更快;未来意义词呈现在右边或右手反应时反应更快,即存在空间时间反应编码联合效应(STEARC效应)。(2)未来意义词激活右侧的注意,过去意义词倾向于激活左侧的注意。结果表明存在左右走向的心理时间线,过去在左,未来在右。

Previous studies have shown that past and future temporal concepts are represented in terms of space（The past is onto left part of the timeline and the future is onto right part of the timeline）.However,the findings from across-culture studies of spatial representations of time are not consistent.Researchers found that the direction of reading/writing in a language affects the way people represent time.People who read/write left to right represent time spatially from left to right,while people who read/write right to left show the reverse pattern.The purpose of this study is to investigate whether Chinese speakers（read/write left to right） tend to conceptualize time as running from left to right. A total of 28 undergraduate and graduate students（age range：19-28 years;21 females and 7 males） participated in the study.All of them were native Chinese speakers.A total of 48 temporal words of Chinese were used,half of them referring to past time and the other half referring to future time.The participant responded to each target object by pressing the key（＂F＂or＂J＂） on the computer keybord.Experiment 1 was conducted with a 2（words Location：left/right）×2（response side：left/right）×2（temporal reference： past/future） within-subject design,to examine whether participants can classify the temporal reference of a word faster when the stimulus -response assignment was congruent with the assumed mental left-to-right representation of time.Experiment 2 aims at further investigating whether time words bias spatial attention,by a modified version of the spatial cuing paradigm as used in Santiago et.al studies. A word＇ s temporal reference was kept in working memory while participants carried out a spatial localization.It was conducted with a 2 （temporal reference：past/future）×2（dot location;left/right）.The dependent variable was the RT time of the subjects push-button, in both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. The findings are as following.In Experiment 1,a STEARC effect was observed.Past words were judged faster when presented to the left and/or responded by the left hand,and future words were judged faster when presented to the right and/or responded by the right hand,which showed a clear time-space congruency during online processing of temporal words.The results are consistent with the view that time is mentally represented from left to right.The past is located to the left and the future to the right in a mental time line. Experiment 2 found that right dots/targets were responded to faster than left dots/targets following future cues,and left dots/targets were responded to faster than right dots/targets following past cues.The results showed that temporal reference was able to orient attention a- long the left-right axis the past shifting attention to the left and the future shifting attention to the right. In conclusion,the study shows the existence of a mental timeline that runs from the left to the right in Chinese Context.The findings are consistent with the space-time conceptual metaphor theory.Abstract concepts of time are represented in terms of concrete dimensions of space.Furthermore,this study also provides experimental support for the assumption that the mapping from space to time takes place at the conceptual level rather than at the level of linguistic expressions.