Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages often use spatial terms to talk about time. FRONT - BACK spatial terms are the terms most often imported from SPACE to TIME cross-linguistically. However, in English there are two different metaphorical mapping systems assigning FRONT - BACK to events in lime. This research examines the psychological reality of the two mapping systems: specifically, w e ask whether subjects construct global domain-mappings between SPACE and TIME when comprehending sentences such as "Graduation lies before her" and "His birthday comes before Christmas." Two experiments were conducted lo test the above question. In both experiments, subjects' comprehension time was slowed down when temporal relations were presented across the two different metaphorical systems inconsistently. This suggests that people had to pay a substantial remapping cost when the mapping system was switched from one to the other. The existence of domain mappings in on-line processing further suggests that the two SPACE/TIME metaphorical mapping systems are psychologically real.