CANCELLED - Time perception through the language hourglass

Time provides essential structure to human experience. People tend to talk about time using the spatial concepts of distance and quantity (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008). This tendency exhibits considerable crosslinguistic variation. The linguistic relativity hypothesis would hold that speakers of different languages are affected by this crosslinguistic variation in their psychophysical experience of time. In contrast, a universalist account of human cognition would claim that concepts like time are impervious to linguistic influence and so constant and invariable across humans. Here I will review a number of empirical lines of investigation into how spatial language and even writing direction may affect the sequential representation of time in the human mind, before focusing on duration perception. In English and Swedish, distance metaphors are typically used to convey temporal duration (i.e., long time/lång tid). In Greek and Spanish, duration is commonly expressed through quantity metaphors (i.e. poli ora/mucho tiempo, ‘much time’). In a series of experiments, we asked Swedish and Spanish speakers (and bilinguals) to estimate the duration of a growing line or a filling container. Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference: Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. Interestingly, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context. Finally, contrary to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. Taken together, the findings point to an online malleable role of language in shaping time perception, as part of a highly adaptive computational system, in which language can serve both as a top-down and bottom-up source of information.