earticle

영어

This paper aims to examine whether Korean people’s experiences with the cultural artifact, namely calendars, can influence our understanding of ambiguous metaphorical expressions about time in English and Korean. Two experiments investigated calendars would influence reasoning about time. The results of two experiments indicate that the calendar that the days of the week were arranged in ascending order from left-to-right can influence temporal reasoning. Specifically, in the case of English target sentence, the calendar produced a greater proportion of Friday responses relative to Monday, while in the case of Korean target sentence, the calendar produced no greater proportion of Friday responses in the Normal Calendar conditions than in the Metalinguistic or Reverse Calendar conditions. I suggest it is because Korean’s familiarity with time-moving sentences in everyday language has more influence on temporal reasoning than their experiences with the cultural artifact, namely calendars. Based on the results of Experiment 1 and 2, I conclude that Korean participants may also use culturally specific spatial representations when reasoning about time but they have a tendency to prefer the time-moving perspective to the ego-moving perspective in their interpretation of ambiguous metaphorical expressions about time.