Search

Human communication has a remarkable capacity todescribe events that occurred elsewhere and at othertimes. In particular, when describing complex narratives,speakers must communicate temporal structure using amixture of words (e.g., “after”), gestures (e.g., pointingrightward for a later event), and discourse structure (e.g.,mentioning earlier events first). How do listenersintegrate these sources of temporal information to makesense of complex narratives? In two experiments, wesystematically manipulated gesture, speech, and order-of-mention to investigate their respective impacts oncomprehension of temporal structure. Gesture had asignificant effect on interpretations of temporal order.This influence of gesture, however, was weaker than theinfluence of both speech and order-of-mention. Indeed,in some cases, order-of-mention trumped explicitdescriptions in speech; for instance, if ‘earlier’ eventswere mentioned second, they were sometimes thought tohave occurred second. Listeners integrate multiplesources of information to interpret what happened when.

Reasoning about bedrock abstract concepts such as time, number, and valence relies on spatial metaphor and often on multiple spatial metaphors for a single concept. Previous research has documented, for instance, both future-in-front and future-to-right metaphors for time in English speakers. It is often assumed that these metaphors, which appear to have distinct experiential bases, remain distinct in online temporal reasoning. In two studies we demonstrate that, contra this assumption, people systematically combine these metaphors. Evidence for this combination was found in both directly elicited (Study 1) and spontaneous co-speech (Study 2) gestures about time. These results provide first support for the hypothesis that the metaphorical representation of time, and perhaps other abstract domains as well, involves the continuous co-activation of multiple metaphors rather than the selection of only one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we often talk about time using spatial terms, experimental investigation of space-time associations has focused primarily on the space in front of the participant. This has had two consequences: the disregard of the space behind the participant (exploited in language and gesture) and the creation of potential task demands produced by spatialized manual button-presses. We introduce and test a new paradigm that uses auditory stimuli and vocal responses to address these issues. Participants made temporal judgments about deictic or sequential relationships presented auditorily along a body-centered sagittal or transversal axis. Results involving the transversal axis replicated previous work while sagittal axis results were surprising. Deictic judgments did not use the sagittal axis but sequential judgments did, in a previously undocumented way. Participants associated earlier judgments with the space in front of them and later judgments with the space behind them. These findings, using a new approach, provide evidence that different time concepts recruit space differently, mediated by meaning, stimulus modality and response mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]