Where does the conceptual spacetime asymmetry come from?
Abstract
Why do people use space to think about time more than vice versa? On one account, a spacetime asymmetry in languagegives rise to the spacetime asymmetry in thought. If so, children should learn that polysemous words like long and shorthave primarily spatial meanings on the basis of language statistics. Yet usage statistics from which children could inferthe primacy of space are not obviously available in adult-to-child speech: Instead, caregivers use long and short moreoften in temporal senses than spatial senses (Casasanto & Ksa, 2019). Here we corroborate this result using word2vec, avector space model that reflects the co-occurrence structure of words. We show that the spacetime asymmetry is also notavailable in this semantic space: more words surrounding long and short are temporal than spatial. Rather than emergingfrom language, the spacetime asymmetry may reflect perceptual or conceptual asymmetries that precede the acquisition ofspatio-temporal language.