ArticleFrontiers in psychology2023
Writing direction and language activation affect how Arabic-English bilingual speakers map time onto space.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Effect of Writing Direction and Task-Specific Experience on Mapping Time and Numbers on Space.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Horizontal mapping of time-related words in first and second language.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Spatialization of time in bilinguals: what do we make of the effect of the testing language?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
We investigated whether writing direction and language activation influence how bilingual speakers map time onto space. More specifically, we investigated how Arabic-English bilingual speakers conceived where (e.g., on the left or on the right) different time periods (e.g., past, present, future) were located, depending on whether they were tested in Arabic (a language that is written from right to left) or in English (a language that is written from left to right). To analyze this, participants were given a task that involved arranging cards depicting different scenes of a story in chronological order. Results show that, when tested in Arabic, participants were significantly more likely to use right-to-left arrangements (following the Arabic writing direction), compared to when tested in English.
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