Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?

Do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Boroditsky, (2001) demonstrated that speakers of English and Mandarin think differently about time. This work has recently been brought into question (January & Kako, 2007; Chen, 2007). Here I present new evidence that again demonstrates a difference between English and Mandarin speakers’ construals of time. Both languages use horizontal and vertical spatial language to talk about time. For example, in English we might say that the best is ahead of us, or we may move a meeting up. In English, vertical metaphors are relatively infrequent and horizontal metaphors predominate. In Mandarin, both horizontal and vertical metaphors are frequent. Importantly, vertical metaphors are much more frequent in Mandarin than they are in English. The new evidence once again suggests that Mandarin speakers don’t just talk about time vertically more frequently than do English speakers, they also think about time vertically more frequently than do English speakers.