时间焦点对前后方向上内隐时空映射的影响——来自汉族和羌族的证据
摘要
<p id="C2">According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), metaphors allow people to rely on concrete, familiar knowledge such as spatial experience to understand abstract concepts such as time. For example, many languages throughout the world tend to associate the front side of space with the future and the back side with the past. Abundant evidence has shown that people think about time according to the space-time mappings in their speech. However, recent lines of research have suggested that people may not spatialize time as their language suggests. According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, people’s implicit space-time mappings are shaped by their cultural attitudes toward time. Compared to <italic>Han</italic> Chinese, <italic>Qiang</italic> Chinese tend to focus more on past times and older generations and place more values on their tradition and culture. Thus, it can be hypothesized that <italic>Qiang</italic> Chinese, who focus more on the past, should be more likely to conceptualize the past as in front of them than <italic>Han</italic> Chinese. <p id="C101">In Experiment 1, we administered a “time diagram task” in which participants were presented with a sheet depicting a cartoon character seen from above with a box ahead of him and another behind him. Participants were told that the character visited a friend who loved plants yesterday, and tomorrow he would be going to visit a friend who loves animals (or vice versa, as event-to-space assignment was counterbalanced). Participants were asked to place “plant” and “animal” in the boxes. In Experiment 2, we used a Temporal Focus Scale to quantify the proposed difference in temporal focus between <italic>Han</italic> and <italic>Qiang</italic> Chinese. It consisted of 8 assertions denoting opinions about past- and future-related topics. In Experiment 3, <italic>Han</italic> and <italic>Qiang</italic> Chinese participants were asked to complete a time classification task. In this task, they categorized the