Elsevier

Cortex

Volume 76, March 2016, Pages 43-50
Cortex

Research report
The grounding of temporal metaphors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.12.007Get rights and content

Abstract

Grounded cognition suggests that the processing of conceptual knowledge cued by language relies on the sensory-motor regions. Does temporal language similarly engage brain areas involved in time perception? Participants read sentences that describe the temporal extent of events with motion verbs (The hours crawled until the release of the news) and their static controls. Comparison conditions were fictive motion (The trail crawled until the end of the hills) and literal motion (The caterpillar crawled towards the top of the tree), along with their static controls. Several time sensitive locations, identified using a meta-analysis, showed activation specific to temporal metaphors, including in the left insula, right claustrum, and bilateral posterior superior temporal sulci. Fictive and literal motion contrasts did not show this difference. Fictive motion contrast showed activation in a conceptual motion sensitive area of the left posterior inferior temporal sulcus (ITS). These data suggest that language of time is at least partially grounded in experiential time. In addition, motion semantics has different consequences for events and objects: temporal events become animate, while static entities become motional.

Introduction

We experience time continuously, and we talk about time from time to time. The semantic processing of temporal concepts, while very common in language, is a mystery. According to grounded cognition theories, the processing of conceptual knowledge cued by language relies on the sensory-motor regions of the brain (Barsalou, 2008, Gallese and Lakoff, 2005). This has been supported by a large body of evidence, in the domains of action, vision, audition, and emotion (Binder & Desai, 2011). Does temporal language similarly engage brain areas involved in the processing of experiential time? We can typically comprehend concepts describing temporal intervals from seconds to millennia in a few hundred milliseconds. Nonetheless, it is possible that some level of grounding is maintained in the regions sensitive to temporal processing, especially when time is described metaphorically. Here, we ask whether metaphorical temporal language processing maintains grounding in brain regions implicated in the perception of time.

Neuroimaging work has implicated an extensive, distributed network for time perception, estimation, and production (Meck et al., 2008, Merchant et al., 2013, Penney and Vaitilingam, 2008, Wiener et al., 2010). While there is no evidence for dedicated timing machinery, several regions have been consistently associated with temporal processing, as identified in a meta-analysis (Wiener et al. 2010). In studies of supra-second timing capabilities, most studies have employed motor timing tasks (e.g., finger tapping) or perceptual timing tasks (e.g., comparing two time intervals). Partially overlapping sets of regions in both hemispheres have been identified for both of these tasks (see Methods).

Instead of investigating whether temporal language is related to temporal perception, numerous studies have examined whether temporal language is related to spatial perception (Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002, Bottini et al., 2015) or to spatial language (Boroditsky, 2000, Kemmerer, 2005, Kranjec et al., 2010, Lai and Boroditsky, 2013, Teuscher et al., 2008). The majority of the findings support the idea that temporal language is tied to spatial perception, cognition, and language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). For instance, Matlock, Ramscar, and Boroditsky (2005) tested whether motion semantics was recruited in descriptions of non-motion entities and scenes, known as fictive motion, e.g., “The tattoo runs along his spine” and ambiguous temporal statements “Next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days”. They found that reading fictive motion sentences affected subsequent interpretation of the ambiguous temporal statements (i.e., whether the meeting has been moved earlier or later).

Not all studies support the association between space and time. Kemmerer (2005) examined spatial-temporal prepositions (e.g., “at”), which can be read temporally (e.g., “at noon”) and spatially (e.g., “at home”), in four patients with left perisylvian lesions. Two patients performed significantly better on understanding spatial than temporal meanings, and the other two showed the reverse pattern. Lower performance on spatial meaning was associated with damage to the left supramarginal gyrus. Localization of temporal processing was unclear, beyond the suggestion that it was likely perisylvian. Kranjec, Cardillo, Schmidt, Lehet, and Chatterjee (2012) examined space, time, and causality using short phrases such as “The dog barked” and “The rain poured”. Participants judged the space/time/causal relations between the short phrases. They found that space trials, compared against the other two, activated visual areas including bilateral frontal and occipitoparietal networks. The time contrast showed no significant activation. The causality contrast, however, showed activations in time processing areas such as supplementary motor area (SMA), caudate, and cerebellum. Reflecting on these findings, Kranjec and Chatterjee (2010) noted that the brain regions involved in temporal perception are at least partially known, and it should be possible to examine representations of temporal concepts and their grounding. They questioned whether temporal concepts are grounded in spatial perception areas, time perception areas, or not grounded at all, and pointed out that there is little neural evidence for grounding of temporal concepts. We add that on the flip side, there is no evidence, either neural or behavioral, of a circular amodal symbol system representing, or having the capability to represent, concepts.

The present study investigated the extent to which temporal language activates areas implicated in temporal processing. We used fictive motion sentences about time (FM-time). These sentences use motion verbs to describe the temporal extent of events, e.g., “The hours crawled until the release of the news”. As comparisons, two other types of sentences were used: fictive motion sentences for space (FM-space), e.g., “The trail crawled until the end of the hills”, and literal motion (LM), e.g., “The caterpillar crawled towards the top of the tree”. For each sentence type, corresponding static versions were used as controls (Table 1). Activation in temporal processing regions by FM-time sentences, relative to their static controls, addresses the question whether temporal language leads to activations in time processing regions. The FM-space and LM sentences allow us to test whether this activation is specific to time, or is more general and also elicited by other types of figurative motion or by LM sentences.

Section snippets

Participants

Twenty-three healthy, right-handed, native English speakers participated in the experiment for payment. One participant was removed due to high degree of movement. The remaining twenty-two (11 female) included in the analysis have a mean age of 21.9 (SD = 3.13, range 19–34). All participants gave written informed consent prior to participation.

Materials

The stimuli were sentences, divided into six conditions (Table 1). The temporal fictive motion sentences (FM-time) each described the temporal extent of

Results

The average percentage of participants responding to the probe questions was 89% (SD = 9%), with average accuracy of 72% (SD = 12).

In the temporal ROIs, greater activation for FM-time relative to FM-time control was found in the left insula [t(21) = 2.342, p < .05, Cohen's d = .35], right claustrum [t(21) = 2.338, p < .05, Cohen's d = .42] (Fig. 1), and bilateral pSTS [left: t(21) = 2.830, p < .01, Cohen's d = .28, right t(21) = 3.487, p < .005, Cohen's d = .39] (Fig. 2). Marginal differences

Discussion

Processing temporal semantics, at least when temporal events are described in a fictive manner using action/motion verbs, activates some of the areas that keep track of time intervals. This is the first evidence of the involvement of time processing areas in temporal language. This activation is not simply due to the use of motion verbs or the metaphoric nature of the sentences, because the fictive motion and LM sentences do not show this difference relative to their controls. Thus, the

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIH/NIDCD grant R01 DC010783. We thank Tim Boiteau and Scott Vendemia for help with scanning participants.

References (46)

  • P.A. Lewis et al.

    Brain activation patterns during measurement of sub-and supra-second intervals

    Neuropsychologia

    (2003)
  • W.H. Meck et al.

    Cortico-striatal representation of time in animals and humans

    Current Opinion in Neurobiology

    (2008)
  • U. Noppeney et al.

    Retrieval of abstract semantics

    NeuroImage

    (2004)
  • Z.S. Saad et al.

    A new method for improving functional-to-structural MRI alignment using local Pearson correlation

    NeuroImage

    (2009)
  • M. Wiener et al.

    The image of time: a voxel-wise meta-analysis

    NeuroImage

    (2010)
  • M. Wittmann et al.

    Accumulation of neural activity in the posterior insula encodes the passage of time

    Neuropsychologia

    (2010)
  • M. Wittmann et al.

    Neural substrates of time perception and impulsivity

    Brain Research

    (2011)
  • D.A. Balota et al.

    The English lexicon project

    Behavior Research Methods

    (2007)
  • L.W. Barsalou

    Grounded cognition

    Annual Review of Psychology

    (2008)
  • Y. Benjamini et al.

    Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing

    Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological)

    (1995)
  • J.R. Binder et al.

    Where is the semantic system? A critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies

    Cerebral Cortex

    (2009)
  • L. Boroditsky et al.

    The roles of body and mind in abstract thought

    Psychological Science

    (2002)
  • M. Brysbaert et al.

    Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas

    Behavior Research Methods

    (2014)
  • Cited by (14)

    • Temporal features of concepts are grounded in time perception neural networks: An EEG study

      2023, Brain and Language
      Citation Excerpt :

      Event concepts, represented both by verbs (to eat) and nouns (the pandemic) unfold over time. Lai and Desai (2016) examined fictive motion sentences used as metaphors for time (e.g., The hours crawled until the release of the news) and found that portions of the temporal perception network are selectively involved in processing such sentences compared to spatial metaphors. However, it is not clear if and to what extent temporal features of lexical concepts, without such metaphoric context, are processed in the time perception networks of the brain.

    • To move or not to move: An ERP study on the processing of fictive and literal motion expressions

      2020, Lingua
      Citation Excerpt :

      In a follow-up study, Cacciari and Francesca (2013) reported that motor activation may arise in early phases of comprehension processes (i.e. upon reading the verb of fictive motion), then decay as a function of the strength of the semantic motion component of the verb. Lai and Desai (2016) uncovered that fictive motion or literal motion sentences did not show significant activation in the motion-sensitive visual areas (MT+) of the brain relative to their static controls. Rather, fictive motion sentences showed activation in a conceptual motion sensitive area of the left posterior temporal sulcus (ITS).

    • Messages must be tuned to the target language: Some implications of crosslinguistic semantic diversity for neurolinguistic research on speech production

      2019, Journal of Neurolinguistics
      Citation Excerpt :

      For instance, I proposed that the concepts encoded by shape-related classifiers may be implemented partly in sectors of the left ventral temporal cortex that are already believed to store conceptual knowledge about the shapes of things. Along similar lines, although it is still completely unclear how the meanings of tense markers are represented in the brain, this topic has begun to receive some attention in aphasiology (Bastiaanse, 2013), and additional hints come from recent work on the temporal uses of both prepositions (Kemmerer, 2005) and motion verbs (Lai & Desai, 2016). Finally, although we know next to nothing about the neural substrates of the meanings of evidential markers, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that these epistemological concepts rely to some extent on the mentalizing (a.k.a. theory of mind) network, since it provides the foundation for representing one's own and other's beliefs (Schurz, Radua, Aichhorn, Richlan, & Perner, 2014).

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text