Does time flow vertically in Chinese? The quest for groundbreaking evidence for linguistic relativity

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Chinese refers to time in strikingly different ways to the English language. For instance, "the year after next" in Chinese, hou nian, literally translates to 'back year' in English. Therefore, on the front-back axis, Chinese expressions violates the convention of having the future associated with the front space (and the past with the back space). This could be a moot point of course if the difference in expression across languages had no impact on thinking. Many prominent language scholars have argue that such differences in terminology are uninteresting (see for instance Pinker, 2007) because they say that such word differences have no repercussions on thought. However, such arguments are mostly if not entirely based on intuition rather than scientific data. Therefore, the establishment of a link between expressions specific to one language, such as Chinese, and mental representations such as time conceptualisation, are critical in the debate which has become known as the linguistic relativity debate.Previous studies (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001; Boroditsky, Fuhrman & McCormick, 2011) have provided some evidence in favour of a linguistic relativity effect in relation to time conceptualisation. However, such studies based solely on behavioural measurements and conducted in conditions where participants are likely to become aware of the critical manipulations implemented, can only fuel the debate, because it remains an open question whether individuals having specific expressions in their native language to express time actually think differently about time, or whether they are merely influenced by conscious references to language whilst performing a task (the weak version of linguistic relativity according to Pinker, 2007).Providing rigorous and definitive evidence for a link between specific language expressions and thought patterns requires the use of methods that do not solely rely on behavioural measurements and that predictively assess unconscious thought processes. This is exactly what the applicant has set out to do during her PhD, and indeed, we already obtained evidence for back-to-front orientation inversion operating unconsciously in Chinese-English bilinguals using measures of brain activity (Li et al., 2019).Here, we intend to go beyond showing that specific words can conflict with time-space relationships by investigating generalization effects of language expressions on thinking. The goal is to provide the first tangible and scientifically robust evidence that Chinese native speakers conceptualise the passing of time not only on a horizontal (front-back) axis, but also along a vertical axis by extending 'vertical' thinking to expressions of time that make no reference to the vertical axis (or in fact no reference to space). In an experiment that requires physical reconfiguration of the research laboratory of the applicant's mentor, we will investigate how temporal expressions of Chinese referring to the upper and lower space to express past and future events interfere with the sound origin of speech in the environment around the participant. For example, the Chinese words shang zhou refer to 'last week' and literally translate into "up week" in English. When such expression is presented through a loudspeaker situated above the head of the participant, is it easier to process for their brain than when the loudspeaker is situated below their chair? We hypothesise that it will be the case. Critically, however, will this effect also apply for temporal expressions like qu nian - "last year", which literally translate into "gone year" and has no relationship to space? We contend that any interference between the origin of speech in space and the past/future reference of purely temporal expressions in Chinese would be the first compelling evidence for an effect of language expression on time conceptualisation. Such a finding would represent groundbreaking new evidence in the field of linguistic relativity.