Tsung Linda, Wu Dandan
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW, Australia.
School of Education, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 18;11:565763. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.565763. eCollection 2020.
The Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis suggests that temporal expression is based on spatial metaphor for all human beings. This study examines its applicability in the Chinese language using the data elicited from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus (ECMC) (Li and Tse, 2011), which collected the utterances produced by 168 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in a semistructured play context. The unique pair of Chinese words, (/before/front) and (/after/back), which can be used to express either time (before/after) or space (front/back) in daily communication, was the unit of analysis. The results indicated that: (1) there was a significant age effect in the production of "qian/hou," indicating that the period before the age of 4.5 may be critical for the development of temporal and spatial expression; (2) the pair was produced to express time (before/after) much earlier than space (front/back), indicating that the expression of time might not necessarily be based on the spatial metaphor; and (3) the pair was used more frequently to express time (before/after) than space (front/back) by the preschoolers, thus challenging the hypothesis.
通用时空映射假说表明，对于所有人来说，时间表达都基于空间隐喻。本研究使用从幼儿普通话语料库（ECMC）（Li和Tse，2011）中获取的数据，考察该假说在汉语中的适用性。该语料库收集了168名说普通话的学龄前儿童在半结构化游戏情境中说出的话语。在日常交流中可用于表达时间（之前/之后）或空间（前面/后面）的独特汉语词汇对“前/后”，是分析的单位。结果表明：（1）在“前/后”的使用上存在显著的年龄效应，表明4.5岁之前的时期可能对时间和空间表达的发展至关重要；（2）该词汇对用于表达时间（之前/之后）的时间远早于表达空间（前面/后面）的时间，表明时间表达不一定基于空间隐喻；（3）学龄前儿童使用该词汇对表达时间（之前/之后）的频率高于表达空间（前面/后面）的频率，因此对该假说提出了挑战。
