Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates whether linguistic influences can affect the manifestation of lateral space-valence mappings in people's minds. Although most oral languages and cultures of the world have expressions and conventions that associate the good with the right space, this association seems to be body- specific: while right-handers associate positive concepts with the right side and negative concepts with the left side, left- handers have the oppositive association, and the size of the effect of the body specificity does not vary with linguistic and cultural conventions. Thus, it is widely believed that this conceptual metaphor only depends on the body. However, sign languages do not seem to have any conventional association between lateral space and valence, and a recent study has shown that signers do not associate valence with lateral space, opening the possibility of a causal influence of language. The present study set to replicate this surprising and controversial finding by comparing a sign language group, consisting of Spanish and Chinese Sign Language users, and an oral Spanish control group on the widely applied “Bob” task in this field. Supporting prior findings, Spanish language participants associated the “good” with their dominant side of space, closely matching the anticipated proportion, but signers did not. This pattern of results can be explained by a strong linguistic influence on the formation of lateral associations of emotional valence, but we discuss some alternative possibilities.