Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

When people talk about time, they almost never do so literally — instead they say that a deadline is "approaching," that the weekend "flew by," or that a difficult period is "behind them." Research at the intersection of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience investigates how these spatial and bodily metaphors shape the way people actually think, reason, and make decisions about time, not just how they talk about it. Cross-cultural comparisons have shown that speakers of different languages arrange time along different mental axes — left-to-right, front-to-back, or even vertically — raising the question of how much language determines thought versus simply reflecting deeper cognitive structures. Ongoing work examines the neural mechanisms underlying metaphor comprehension, how embodied experience anchors abstract concepts, and whether changing the metaphors people use can measurably shift their reasoning about goals, planning, and causality.

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137,215

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1,590,764

Keywords

MetaphorTimeLanguageCognitionEmbodimentSpatial Metaphors