Spatial Mapping of Verbal Tense Forms in the Hebrew Language

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that speakers of different languages conceptualize time using different spatial metaphors. English speakers represent time on a horizontal line, with the past on the left, and the future on the right. The Chinese speakers use the vertical axis: time flows for them "from top to bottom". And the speakers of some Australian languages conceptualize time using geographical coordinates (Levinson, 2003). Previous research (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2011) has shown that speakers of languages with left-to-right writing systems map time on the horizontal axis from left to right, with earlier events mapped on the left. The goal of this study was to test if the direction of the script affects implicit processing of words expressing different temporal references. We consider cross-linguistic differences based on three languages with different directions of writing - Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew. This work describes the new experiment with Hebrew language and also mentions our previous experiments with Russian and Japanese. Forty native speakers of Hebrew, a language written from right to left, participated in an eye-tracking experiment. The same method and procedure was used for all three experiments in this study. While looking at a fixation cross in the middle of the screen, a participant heard a verb either in the past or the non-past tense, or a filler noun. Participant’s eye movements were recorded during the trial. We expected the effect on x axis for Hebrew. The resulting data was analyzed using mixed-effects linear models with main effects for verb tense. A significant main effect of verb tense for the x axis was found: • For Hebrew, gaze coordinates were shifted to the right for verbs in the past tense as compared to non-past (95% credible interval: [0.41, 2.01 px]). These results confirmed our hypothesis about the influence of the direction of writing on spatial orientation.