To each their own: a review of individual differences and metaphorical perspectives on time.

How do people talk-and potentially think-about abstract concepts? Supported by abundant linguistic evidence, Conceptual Metaphor Theory posits that people draw upon concrete concepts to structure abstract ones via metaphorical connections. Often, the source domain for a metaphor draws upon embodied physical experience, as in the time is space system, whereby representations in the domain of time are thought to arise from experiences of navigating through, orienting within, and observing motion in space. In recent years, psychological evidence has suggested that the connections between space and time are indeed conceptual; however, many gaps in our understanding of the workings of metaphor remain. Notably, until recently, the unique variations in the ways in which people experience metaphor have been largely overlooked, with much research falling prey to what Dabrowska has identified as one of the 'deadly sins' of cognitive linguistics: to ignore individual differences. By focusing on two widely studied metaphors for time, Moving Time and Moving Ego, this review article shines a spotlight on the varied ways in which people draw on their embodied and enculturated experiences, along with 'human experience' on an individual level and the contexts within which they use metaphor. In doing so, it highlights the importance for metaphoric conceptualization of variation across languages, across contexts, and across individuals, suggesting that while the use and interpretation of metaphor may begin with cross-domain connections, they are but part of the story.

Cognitive Science: Piecing Together the Puzzle.

Alongside significant gains in our understanding of the human mind, research in Cognitive Science has produced substantial evidence that the details of cognitive processes vary across cultures, contexts, and individuals. In order to arrive at a more nuanced account of the workings of the human mind, in this letter we argue that one challenge for the future of Cognitive Science is the integration of this evidence of variation with findings which can be generalized.

Converging on a theory of language through multiple methods.

Assuming that linguistic representation has been studied only by linguists using grammaticality judgments, Branigan & Pickering (B&P) present structural priming as a novel alternative. We show that their assumptions are incorrect for cognitive-functional linguistics, exposing converging perspectives on form/meaning pairings between generativists and cognitive-functional linguists that we hope will spark the cross-disciplinary discussion necessary to produce a cognitively plausible model of linguistic representation.

Moving through time: the role of personality in three real-life contexts.

In English, two deictic space-time metaphors are in common usage: the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the Moving Time metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward toward the ego (Clark, 1973). Although earlier research investigating the psychological reality of these metaphors has typically examined spatial influences on temporal reasoning (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002), recent lines of research have extended beyond this, providing initial evidence that personality differences and emotional experiences may also influence how people reason about events in time (Duffy & Feist, 2014; Hauser, Carter, & Meier, 2009; Richmond, Wilson, & Zinken, 2012). In this article, we investigate whether these relationships have force in real life. Building on the effects of individual differences in self-reported conscientiousness and procrastination found by Duffy and Feist (2014), we examined whether, in addition to self-reported conscientiousness and procrastination, there is a relationship between conscientious and procrastinating behaviors and temporal perspective. We found that participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective were more likely to exhibit conscientious behaviors, while those who adopted the Moving Ego perspective were more likely to procrastinate, suggesting that the earlier effects reach beyond the laboratory.

Motion through syntactic frames.

The introduction of Talmy's (1985, 2000) typology sparked significant interest in linguistic relativity in the arena of motion language. Through careful analysis of the conflation patterns evident in the language of motion events, Talmy noted that one class of languages, V-languages, tends to encode path along with the fact of motion in motion verbs, while a second class, S-languages, tends to encode manner. In the experimental literature, it was reasoned that speakers may be expected to extend novel verbs in accordance with the lexicalization patterns of their native languages. However, the results regarding this prediction are mixed. In this paper, I examine the interplay between the meaning encoded in the motion verb itself and the meaning encoded in the motion description construction, offering a Gricean explanation for co-occurrence patterns and, by extension, for the mixed results. I then explore the implications of this argument for research on possible language effects on thought in this domain.

Space between languages.

What aspects of spatial relations influence speakers' choice of locative? This article presents a study of static spatial descriptions from 24 languages. The study reveals two kinds of spatial terms evident cross-linguistically: specific spatial terms and general spatial terms (GSTs). Whereas specific spatial terms-including English prepositions-occur in a limited range of situations, with concomitant specificity in their meaning, GSTs occur in all spatial descriptions (in languages that employ them). Because of the extreme differences in range of application, the two are considered separately. A multidimensional scaling analysis is used with specific spatial terms to extract statistically valid similarities across the languages sampled. For GSTs, which have not been previously analyzed in the literature, a semantic analysis is proposed and experimentally validated. The results suggest the importance of geometry, function, and qualitative physics to the meanings of both kinds of spatial terms, although the details differ.

Spatial language influences memory for spatial scenes.

Does language influence recognition for spatial scenes? In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed ambiguous pictures, with or without spatial sentences. In a yes-no recognition task, only the spatial sentences group made more false alarms toward the center of the spatial category than in the other direction; three other comparison groups showed no such tendency. This shift toward the core of the semantic category suggests that spatial language interacted with perceptual information during encoding. In Experiment 3, we varied the materials to test the interactive encoding account against a separate encoding account in which separately stored sentences are accessed during picture recognition. The results support the interactive encoding account in which spatial language influences the encoding and memory of spatial relations.