Connecting Space and Time: Bilinguals Associate Time with Space in Both Their First and Second Languages
An international team of researchers including scientists at HSE University investigated how bilingual individuals associate time with space. It turns out that in both their first and second languages, people associate the past with the left side of space and the future with the right. In fact, the higher the proficiency in a second language, the more pronounced this relationship becomes. The study findings have been published in Scientific Reports.
Many concepts in language, both concrete and abstract, are perceived through the lens of sensorimotor experience and are associated with a spatial category. For example, processing words with implicit spatial referents, such as 'bird' and 'root,' induces corresponding systematic upward and downward attentional shifts. The association of words with specific positions in space is known as spatial mapping. This phenomenon is also observed in the processing of abstract concepts with emotional, numerical, and temporal semantics. Thus, when mentally counting hours or days of the week, a horizontal mental timeline is automatically activated, with past events on the left and future events on the right.
To determine whether the connection between time and space applies to bilinguals in their second language, an international team of researchers, including scientists at the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, conducted an experiment. The participants included 53 bilinguals whose native language was Russian and second language was English, as well as 48 native German speakers who spoke English as a foreign language. The subjects were asked to classify time-related words such as 'yesterday, 'tomorrow,' ‘recently,' 'soon,' and others as referring to the past or the future by pressing the left or right response key.
The experiment included two versions of the task: in one version, the left key corresponded to words related to the past and the right key to words related to the future; in the other version, the right key corresponded to words related to the past and the left key to words related to the future.
The results showed that participants in both groups responded more quickly when the spatial representations and keys associated with the words matched, and more slowly when they did not. At the same time, spatial-temporal mapping was more pronounced in those with greater proficiency in their second language.
To assess their proficiency in the second language, all participants completed the Cambridge General English Test and a translation task.
Anastasia Malyshevskaya
'We replicated our experiment with two groups of bilinguals and found spatial-temporal mapping to be a consistent phenomenon. Moreover, we discovered a connection between the strength of spatial effects and the level of proficiency in a second language: the higher a person’s proficiency, the more pronounced their spatial-temporal mapping,' says the study author Anastasia Malyshevskaya, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making.
According to the researchers, learning a second language can improve cognitive flexibility and spatial-temporal thinking. 'The advantage of bilinguals is that they can use both languages to create intricate temporal mental maps,' according to Malyshevskaya.
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