In the horizontal compatible condition, the left key was designated as “past” and the right key “future,” whereas in the horizontal incompatible condition the key assignment was reversed. Participants had to judge if the image stood for the past or future time-point by pressing one of two keys on a keyboard. ( 2011) designed a temporal judgment task (Experiment 1) in which ME bilinguals saw pictures that appeared one after another on the computer screen and depicted buildings/cities representing the past (e.g., ancient ruins) or the future (e.g., science fiction scenes). To examine this possibility, Miles et al. ( 2011) reasoned that sociolinguistic conventions would shape temporal cognition and that the frequent use of L1 Mandarin and L2 English spatiotemporal metaphors might render Mandarin-English (ME) bilinguals to maintain both horizontal (i.e., L2 English) and vertical (i.e., L1 Mandarin) representations of temporal information. While spatiotemporal metaphors in English predominately depict time as flowing along a horizontal plane (e.g., the day before yesterday, after graduation), an additional vertical dimension, i.e., shàng (“up”-referring to an earlier event or time-point) and xià (“down”-referring to a later event or time-point), is also employed in Mandarin. ![]() ( 2011) noted that temporal relations are cross-linguistically expressed using spatiotemporal metaphors. ![]() In one of the influential studies on the MTL, Miles et al. These questions have attracted much attention and controversy. To date, interesting issues concerning MTL include, but are not limited to: cross-linguistic differences in temporal cognition (Boroditsky, 2001 Boroditsky et al., 2011 Fuhrman et al., 2011 Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), factors that may shape the construct of MTL (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012 Fuhrman et al., 2011 Vallesi et al., 2014), directionalities of MTL (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010 Ding et al., 2015), and the number of MTLs that a person can possess (Miles et al., 2011 Sinha et al., 2011). In the literature, the term mental time line (MTL) has been adopted as a typical and immediate way to account for such space-time interactions in the mind (Bonato et al., 2012). For example, accumulating evidence has pointed to the possibility that people represent elapsing time by mapping it onto a linear spatial layout (Santiago et al., 2010 Weger & Pratt, 2008). ![]() A number of theoretical and empirical studies (Bender & Beller, 2014 Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008 Bonato et al., 2012 Fuhrman et al., 2011 Núñez & Cooperrider, 2013 Núñez & Sweetser, 2006) indicate that people may rely on space to think about time. Time and space are tightly linked not only in the physical world, but also in the psychological experience. ![]() Implications for theoretical issues concerning the language-thought relationship in general and the effect of bilingualism on cognition in particular are discussed. Taken together, the evidence in hand is far from sufficient to support Miles et al.’s ( 2011) conclusion that ME bilinguals’ horizontal concept of time is manipulated by English. Specifically, this study highlights the fact that a horizontal time line does exist in a Mandarin speaker’s cognition, even if he/she is a Mandarin monolingual instead of a ME bilingual. This study concludes that a Mandarin speaker has two mental time lines not because he/she has acquired L2 English, but because there are both horizontal and vertical expressions in Mandarin spatiotemporal metaphors. However, the present study, via two experiments, demonstrates that Mandarin monolinguals possess two mental time lines, i.e., one horizontal and one vertical line. Can a mind accommodate two time lines? Miles, Tan, Noble, Lumsden and Macrae (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18, 598–604, 2011) shows that Mandarin-English bilinguals have both a horizontal space-time mapping consistent with linguistic conventions within English and a vertical representation of time commensurate with Mandarin.
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