The effects of spatio-temporal metaphors on the conceptualization of duration: Evidence from Croatian-English bilinguals

Sammanfattning

The present study explored the conceptualization of duration within Croatian-English bilinguals. Two established psychophysical tasks of duration reproduction were implemented to this extent, namely, modified versions of Casasanto’s (2005) growing lines and filling containers task. Participants were either tested with Croatian linguistic prompts or English linguistic prompts. The results showed that Croatian-English bilinguals tested with Croatian linguistic prompts were affected by spatial displacement in both conditions, and that the correlation of displacement and estimated duration was significant in both conditions. Spatial interference was somewhat greater in the filling containers condition, as reflected by the corpus query, which indicated that amount- based and distance-based spatio-temporal metaphors were employed somewhat equally, but that there was an overall prevalence of quantity-based metaphors. These results align with previous research, which showed that speakers of distance-based languages tended to display more spatial interference in the growing lines condition, whereas speakers of quantity-based languages tended to be affected by spatial interference to a greater extent in the filling containers condition (cf. Casasanto et al., 2004; Bylund and Athanasopoulos, 2017; Casasanto et al., 2026). Regarding the English language context, participants were affected by spatial displacement in both conditions, though to a greater extent in the filling containers condition. There were no great effects of English or individual bilingual background variables (i.e., age of acquisition of English, proficiency of English, and frequency of use of English) on the participants’ performance, presumably since Croatian speakers already conceptualized duration both in terms of distance and quantity, and therefore did not need to shift their patterns of the conceptualization of duration to those of English speakers. Overall, the results align with the predictions of the linguistic relativity principle and The Conceptual Metaphor Theory, though further studies need to be conducted to address the limitations of the present study.