Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often use spatial vocabulary to describe temporal rela-tions, and this has increasingly motivated attempts to mapspatial frames of reference (FoRs) onto time. How people as-sign FRONT to time and to temporal entities depends on cul-tural conventions, and is crucial for diagnosing which tem-poral FoR a person actually adopts. Here, we report findingsfrom a survey with speakers of Norwegian that aimed at as-sessing the cultural conventions involved in FRONT assign-ment. Data on temporal movements of events, on the temporalorder of events, and on explicit FRONT assignments to events,time units, and “time itself” suggest that participants use dif-ferent principles for describing fixed relations (static time)versus moving events (dynamic time).