The Influence Of L1 And L2 Use On Chinese And English Speakers’ Temporal Thinking Patterns

The language-thought relationship has long been a complicated scientific question.Questions such as whether aspects of the first language(L1)may influence a person’s thought and whether the second language(L2)may restructure cognition have attracted much attention and brought about controversies in the existing literature.With a special focus on the relationship between temporal cognition and metaphoric patterns in language,this study proposed a hypothesis of "language use affects patterns of thinking".A series of experiments were conducted to address two research questions:1)Does L1 use influence habitual ways of temporal thinking?2)Does L2 use restructure habitual ways of temporal thinking?People are perceived as relying on space to think about time.For example,people may represent elapsing time via a horizontal axis or a vertical axis.To address the first research question,four experiments were designed and undertaken,in which Chinese and English speakers were recruited as participants.The experimental tasks include:1)A spatio-temporal compatibility task in which participants were asked to judge the earlier/later relationship between two pictures along a horizontal and a vertical axis;2)A half-open designed temporal arrangement task in which participants were asked to arrange in order a series of pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events along a horizontal or a vertical axis;3)An open-designed temporal arrangement task in which participants were asked to freely arrange in order a series of pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events;4)A priming task in which participants were asked to process non-linguistic horizontal and vertical target stimuli after both horizontal and vertical linguistic primes.Results of Experiment 1-4 show that L1 use influence habitual temporal thinking patterns.There are both differences and similarities in Chinese and English speakers’ temporal thinking patterns.English speakers rely on a horizontal line to think about time,while Chinese speakers access both a horizontal and a vertical representation of temporal information.These space-time mappings in cognition can be approximately predicted by patterns in English and Chinese spatio-temporal metaphors respectively.It was found that inter-individual variations exist within the Chinese population.Approximately 80%of the Chinese speakers display their horizontal bias between the two mental time lines,while about 20%show a vertical bias.Therefore,L1 use may tentatively taken as one of the most important forces that affect the construction of temporal thinking patterns.However,it can not be understood as the only decisive factor.Based on the results yielded from Experiment 1-4,four consecutive experiments(i.e.,Experiment 5-8)were carried out to address the second research question,namely,examining whether L2 use may reshape habitual ways of temporal thinking.In the four experiments,Chinese speakers of L2 English and English speakers of L2 Chinese were recruited as participants.The experimental procedures were almost the same as those used in Experiment 1-4,with some minor adaptations(e.g.,instructions and linguistic stimuli were presented in participants’ L2).Results of Experiment 5-8 indicate that L2 use does not affect habitual temporal thinking patterns.Two mental time lines coexist in the mind of each Chinese speaker of L2 English,while English speakers of L2 Chinese accommodate just one single horizontal time line in his/her cognition.There are also inter-individual variations regarding the horizontal and vertical preference of the two mental time lines within the population of Chinese speakers of L2 English.It may thus be concluded that L2 use does not reshape habitual temporal thinking patterns.Taken together,the hypothesis that "language use affects patterns of thinking" was partially supported by the evidence yielded from the 8 experiments.To be specific,the notion of "language use" in this hypothesis refers merely to L1 use,but cannot be extended to L2 use.Both theoretical and practical implications can be drawn from this study.We refine the findings concerning the relationship between Ll and thinking patterns in the domain of temporal cognition.We also revise and reestablish current mainstream theories and hypothesis about L2 and cognition.The findings of the present study shed some light on the importance of cognitive contrastive analysis rather than linguistic contrastive analysis in L2 teaching and learning.