Representations of Diagonal Timelines in English and Mandarin Speakers

Abstract. Background: Much experimental work has established that the passage of time is represented along a horizontal or a vertical mental timeline (MTL). Recent research (Hartmann et al., 2014) discovered an additional diagonal MTL that develops from bottom left to top right. This study sought to extend Hartmann et al.’s (2014) work by exploring if the particular representations of diagonal timelines vary across linguistic communities. Methods: We conducted an experiment that recruited English and Mandarin speakers as participants. The experimental setups measured the participants’ space-time mappings along the bottom-left/top-right, top-left/bottom-right, bottom-right/top-left, and top-right/bottom-left axes. Results: There are cross-linguistic/cultural differences in the mental representations of diagonal timelines. While the English speakers displayed a salient propensity to conceive of time as oriented from bottom left to top right, the Mandarin speakers favored a timeline unfolding from top left to bottom right. Discussion: We assume that cultural artifacts such as writing direction may play an important role in affecting the horizontal dimension of people’s MTLs. The current findings refine the existing literature and demonstrate that distinct types of linguistic metaphors may respectively explain the vertical dimension of the MTLs for speakers of different native languages.