Julio Santiago

Time (also) flies from left to right.

Everyday linguistic expressions in many languages suggest that back and front space is projected onto temporal concepts of past and future (as in the sentencewe are years ahead of them). The present experiment tested the psychological reality of a different space-time conceptual metaphor—projecting the past to left space and the future to right space—for which there are no linguistic traces in any language. Participants categorized words as referring to the past or to the future. Irrelevant to this task, words appeared either to the left or right of the screen, and responses were given by keypresses of the left or right hand. Judgments were facilitated when word position and response mapping were congruent with the left-past right-future conceptual metaphor. These results are discussed in the context of current claims about the embodiment of meaning and the possible mechanisms by which conceptual metaphors can be acquired.

Flexible conceptual projection of time onto spatial frames of reference

Flexibility in conceptual projection constitutes one of the most challenging issues in the embodiment and conceptual metaphor literatures. We sketch a theoretical proposal that places the burden of the explanation on attentional dynamics in interaction with mental models in working memory that are constrained to be maximally coherent. A test of this theory is provided in the context of the conceptual projection of time onto the domain of space. Participants categorized words presented at different spatial locations (back-front, left-right) as referring to the past or to the future. Responses were faster when the irrelevant word location was congruent with the back-past, front-future metaphoric mapping. Moreover, when a new highly task-relevant spatial frame of reference was introduced, it changed the projection of past and future onto space in a way that was congruent with the new frame (past was now projected to left space and future to right space), as predicted by the theory. This study shows that there is substantial flexibility in conceptual projection and opens a venue to study metaphoric variation across tasks, individuals, and cultures as the result of attentional dynamics.

Thinking about the future moves attention to the right.

Previous studies have shown that past and future temporal concepts are spatially represented (past being located to the left and future to the right in a mental time line). This study aims at further investigating the nature of this space-time conceptual metaphor, by testing whether the temporal reference of words orient spatial attention or rather prime a congruent left/right response. A modified version of the spatial cuing paradigm was used in which a words temporal reference must be kept in working memory whilst participants carry out a spatial localization (Experiment 1) or a direction discrimination, spatial Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results showed that the mere activation of the past or future concepts both oriented attention and primed motor responses to left or right space, respectively, and these effects were independent. Moreover, in spite of the fact that such time-reference cues were nonpredictive, the use of a short and a long stimulus onset asynchrony in Experiment 3 showed that these cues modulated spatial attention as typical central cues like arrows do, suggesting a common mechanism for these two types of cuing.

Sequential activation processes in producing words and syllables: Evidence from picture naming

This study examines picture naming latencies for predicted effects of two word retrieval factors: onset complexity and number of syllables. In Experiment 1, naming latency was longer for depicted words with two syllables e.g., demon, than one syllable, e.g., duck, and longer for words beginning with consonant clusters, e.g., drill, than single consonants, e.g., duck. Experiment 2 replicated these results and showed that vowel nucleus and coda complexity did not interact with onset complexity, and did not affect naming latency. Moreover, effects of onset complexity and number of syllables were additive, and unrelated to word frequency, articulatory factors, or picture complexity. These results comport with evidence from speech errors and metalinguistic tasks and with predictions of the Node Structure theory of language production, but do not support production theories that do not predict special processing difficulty for words with complex onsets and multiple syllables.

When You Think About It, Your Past Is in Front of You How Culture Shapes Spatial Conceptions of Time

In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is “ahead” and the past is “behind.” Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the past as ahead of them, despite using spoken metaphors that suggest the opposite. We propose a new account of how space-time mappings become activated in individuals’ minds and entrenched in their cultures, the temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or subculture) is future oriented or past oriented. Results support the temporal-focus hypothesis, demonstrating that the space-time mappings in people’s minds are conditioned by their cultural attitudes toward time, that they depend on attentional focus, and that they can vary independently of the space-time mappings enshrined in language.

Can conceptual congruency effects between number, time, and space be accounted for by polarity correspondence?

Conceptual congruency effects have been interpreted as evidence for the idea that the representations of abstract conceptual dimensions (e.g., power, affective valence, time, number, importance) rest on more concrete dimensions (e.g., space, brightness, weight). However, an alternative theoretical explanation based on the notion of polarity correspondence has recently received empirical support in the domains of valence and morality, which are related to vertical space (e.g., good things are up). In the present study we provide empirical arguments against the applicability of the polarity correspondence account to congruency effects in two conceptual domains related to lateral space: number and time. Following earlier research, we varied the polarity of the response dimension (left-right) by manipulating keyboard eccentricity. In a first experiment we successfully replicated the congruency effect between vertical and lateral space and its interaction with response eccentricity. We then examined whether this modulation of a concrete-concrete congruency effect can be extended to two types of concrete-abstract effects, those between left-right space and number (in both parity and magnitude judgment tasks), and temporal reference. In all three tasks response eccentricity failed to modulate the congruency effects. We conclude that polarity correspondence does not provide an adequate explanation of conceptual congruency effects in the domains of number and time.

Spatial biases in understanding descriptions of static scenes: the role of reading and writing direction

Prior studies on reasoning tasks have shown lateral spatial biases on mental model construction, which converge with known spatial biases in the mental representation of number, time, and events. The latter have been shown to be related to habitual reading and writing direction. The present study bridges and extends both research strands by looking at the processes of mental model construction in language comprehension and examining how they are influenced by reading and writing direction. Sentences like “the table is between the lamp and the TV” were auditorily presented to groups of mono- and bidirectional readers in languages with left-to-right or right-to-left scripts, and participants were asked to draw the described scene. There was a clear preference for deploying the lateral objects in the direction marked by the script of the input language and some hints of a much smaller effect of the degree of practice with the script. These lateral biases occurred in the context of universal strategies for working memory management.

La frecuencia silábica del español escrito por niños: estudio estadístico

espanolPresentamos un diccionario de frecuencia silabica, que se compara con el de Alvarez, Carreiras y de Vega (1992a). A partir de una muestra de palabras obtenidas de redacciones escritas por ninos en edad escolar, se generaron dos recuentos de frecuencias, uno a nivel lexico (frecuencias de palabra) y otro a nivel silabico. Solo los resultados del segundo se presentan aqui. Por cada silaba se proporcionan dos tipos de indices: un indice de dispersion (numero de palabras en los que aparece cada silaba) y un indice de frecuencia (obtenido de sumar el indice de dispersion con la frecuencia de las palabras en las que la silaba aparece). Los dos tipos de indices se presentan tanto en terminos absolutos como relativos a la posicion de la silaba dentro de la palabra. La comparacion con el diccionario de Alvarez et al. (1992a), obtenido a partir de material escrito para adultos, sugiere que no hay cambios importantes en composicion y distribucion del silabario desde la edad escolar a la edad adulta. EnglishA syllable frequency dictionary is presented and compared to that of Alvarez, Carreiras & de Vega (1992a). A sample of Spanish words obtained from written compositions by school children was used to generate both a lexical frequency and a syllable frequency count, of which only the latter is reported here. For each syllable, two types of indexes are given: a dispersion index (number of word types in which each syllable is present), and a frequency index (obtained by adding the dispersion index to the frequency of the word types in which the syllable appears). Both types of indexes are given in absolute terms and also for each position in the word. Comparison with the syllable frequency count by Alvarez et al. (1992a), obtained from printed literature for adults, suggests that there are no major changes in syllabic composition and distribution from school age to adult age

Length Effects Turn Out To Be Syllable Structure Effects: Response to Roelofs (2002).

Roelofs (2002) showed that by-item picture naming latencies in Santiago, MacKay, Palma, & Rho (2000) were linearly related to total number of segments across conditions, suggesting that structural effects of number of syllables and onset complexity might reflect a confound with phonological length. However, Roelofs failed to test the statistical reliability of this relationship with structural factors as covariates, and when we ran these and other analyses on our data, length effects were non-significant for two measures of length. We then discuss three additional Santiago et al. results favouring structural accounts but not length accounts, with number of syllables and onset complexity as the strongest structural factors, with a smaller effect (if any) of coda complexity, and no effect of vowel nucleus complexity. Finally, we argue that structure-sensitive phonological encoding mechanisms that may operate differently in different languages provide a better account of available evidence, including word production data that Roelofs (2002) claims support length accounts.

Contrasting vertical and horizontal representations of affect in emotional visual search

Independent lines of evidence suggest that the representation of emotional evaluation recruits both vertical and horizontal spatial mappings. These two spatial mappings differ in their experiential origins and their productivity, and available data suggest that they differ in their saliency. Yet, no study has so far compared their relative strength in an attentional orienting reaction time task that affords the simultaneous manifestation of both types of mapping. Here, we investigated this question using a visual search task with emotional faces. We presented angry and happy face targets and neutral distracter faces in top, bottom, left, and right locations on the computer screen. Conceptual congruency effects were observed along the vertical dimension supporting the ‘up = good’ metaphor, but not along the horizontal dimension. This asymmetrical processing pattern was observed when faces were presented in a cropped (Experiment 1) and whole (Experiment 2) format. These findings suggest that the ‘up = good’ metaphor is more salient and readily activated than the ‘right = good’ metaphor, and that the former outcompetes the latter when the task context affords the simultaneous activation of both mappings.