How language shapes our perception of time and magnitude

Language does more than carry messages between people. Different languages express time and number in different ways, and that variation appears to affect how their speakers organise temporal and numerical concepts in their minds. Are we bound by the categories our language provides, or can we think beyond them? The question has a long history under the name of linguistic relativity, and the experiments of the last two decades give it a more precise answer than either the enthusiasts or the sceptics of earlier generations expected.

Spatial words and the lexicalisation of time

One of the best-documented ways in which language influences thought is through spatial metaphors for time. Many languages describe temporal concepts with spatial terms, as in 'a long meeting' or 'a short break', and speakers of English tend to place the future ahead of them and the past behind. The mapping of time onto space varies considerably across linguistic communities, however, and that variation lets those cognitive processes be compared across communities (Casasanto, 2008; Huang & Tse, 2017). Which words are used even matters within a single language. Akbuğa and Göksun (2024) asked Turkish speakers to place the events of short scenarios on a diagram that allowed both a front-back axis and a left-right axis. Scenarios written with front-back metaphors, such as an event lying ahead, drew front-back placements, whereas scenarios without spatial metaphors, or with metaphors of another kind, drew left-right placements, which in a left-to-right writing system run from earlier on the left to later on the right. The axis on which people lay out time, then, followed the spatial words in front of them, and in exploratory analyses it also varied with participants' time-management habits and with the temporal distance and order of the events described. Findings of this kind fit the broader picture of a species whose languages differ far more than the classic search for universals allowed (Blasi et al., 2022; Evans & Levinson, 2009).

The Aymara language of the Andes provides one of the most cited cases of linguistic relativity, that is, of an influence of a language on other cognitive and perceptual domains. Núñez and Sweetser (2006) examined how Aymara speakers conceptualise time and found a mapping reversed with respect to English, German or Portuguese. Where English speakers treat the future as ahead and the past as behind, Aymara speakers place the past in front of them and the future behind. The reversal appears in the language, whose word for the past is also the word for the front or the eyes, and in spontaneous gesture, as speakers point forward when talking about the past and over the shoulder when referring to the future. Why might this be? One interpretation, favoured by Núñez and Sweetser, is that the past has been seen and can be inspected, whereas the future is unknown and out of sight, so that the mapping encodes a distinction between the known and the unknown. On this reading, linguistic structure and bodily experience are bound together in Aymara culture rather than one following from the other.

The Aymara case also shows how quickly a single language can become a stand-in for a whole explanation. A later line of work asked whether the past-in-front mapping might reflect a culture's attitude to time as much as its words. De la Fuente et al. (2014) compared Spaniards with Moroccans, whose culture places more value on tradition and the past, and found that Moroccan participants were more likely to place past events in front of themselves, even though Arabic and Spanish express time with similar front-back metaphors. Older Spaniards, whose attention to the past fell between that of younger Spaniards and that of Moroccans, also placed past events in front more often than younger Spaniards did, and priming participants to focus on their past or their future shifted the mapping. Under this temporal-focus hypothesis, language is one influence on the spatial layout of time among several, and the words a community uses may be as much a consequence of its temporal focus as a cause of it.

Mandarin Chinese offers a further example, and a well-known controversy. Mandarin uses vertical as well as horizontal metaphors for time, with earlier events 'up' and later events 'down', as in the words for last month and next month. Boroditsky (2001) reported that Mandarin speakers verified statements such as 'March comes earlier than April' faster after a vertical spatial prime, whereas English speakers were faster after a horizontal one, and concluded that the habitual metaphors of a language shape how its speakers think about time. The Mandarin speakers in that study were Mandarin-English bilinguals responding to English sentences, so what was tested was a habit carried into a second language, not thought in the absence of language. Two independent teams then failed to replicate it, Chen (2007) across four experiments and January and Kako (2007) across six, and the debate that followed brought better designs, larger samples and non-linguistic tasks. Those studies found that Mandarin speakers do arrange time along a vertical axis more often than English speakers do, in an implicit task with no linguistic materials (Boroditsky et al., 2011) and in an explicit pointing task in which the arrangement also tracked proficiency in Mandarin and the direction in which participants read (Fuhrman et al., 2011), although the horizontal axis remains dominant for both groups. The front-back axis has since received the same scrutiny. Gu et al. (2019) recorded the co-speech gestures of Mandarin speakers and found that some of them spontaneously gestured with the past in front and the future behind, especially while producing the Mandarin expressions that encode that mapping, and a temporal performance task confirmed that these speakers can conceive of the future as behind them. Which mapping a speaker used depended on the expression they had just produced, which places the Mandarin case alongside the Moroccan and Spanish one described above. What would it be like to speak a language that structured time in a way entirely different from yours? Would it change how you reflect on the past or plan for the future? The evidence suggests that it would, in measurable and rather small ways, and that the change would depend on which expression you had just used.

How far language reaches into temporal cognition

The research summarised so far indicates that linguistic structures influence how people mentally represent time, but to what extent? Do these effects shape cognition in a lasting way, or do they provide alternative ways of thinking that speakers pick up and put down as the situation demands? Cross-linguistic studies favour the second answer. The Turkish speakers studied by Akbuğa and Göksun (2024) laid time out along the left-right axis when the scenario carried no spatial metaphor, or one of another kind, and switched to the front-back axis when the scenario used front-back words. The Aymara case marks a limit on that flexibility, since its reversed construal is reinforced by language and by gesture alike and is largely static, with only a few attested expressions in which time itself moves. Gu et al. (2019) found that individuals within one linguistic community switch between spatial representations of time depending on the expression at hand and on their own focus. Language, on this view, supplies a set of conventional mappings that interact with other cognitive and cultural influences. In most of the cases studied, then, linguistic habits constrain thought only loosely, and speakers set them aside when the task calls for it.

The influence of language on magnitude perception

Beyond time, language also shapes how people handle numbers. Numerical cognition underlies everyday activities from counting objects to performing calculations, and languages structure number words in ways that affect how those words are read, written and manipulated. If you had learnt arithmetic in a different language, would you solve problems differently today? German offers a natural experiment. Like Dutch, Slovenian and a number of other languages, German inverts the order of tens and units in two-digit number words, so that 42 is spoken as 'two and forty', whereas English names the tens first. Steiner et al. (2021) compared German- and English-speaking children and adults on a task in which a spoken number had to be matched with its written form. German speakers showed more interference from the inversion than English speakers at every age tested, which appeared as slower responses when the spoken and written orders disagreed. Difficulties with inverted numbers predicted arithmetic skill only among the German-speaking children in their second year of school, whereas the general efficiency of matching a spoken number to its written form predicted arithmetic in every group except the German-speaking adults. The structure of number words in a language therefore affects how numbers are learnt and processed, and its consequences are clearest while basic arithmetic is still being acquired. Related work shows that inconsistencies in the grammatical marking of number, another feature that varies across languages, also hinder early numerical development (Haman et al., 2023).

Imagine learning arithmetic as a child in a language where numbers appear in one order on the page and in another in speech. Would it make calculations harder at first? The evidence says yes, and it also says that the difficulty largely fades. Bahnmueller et al. (2015) found no inversion effects in the processing of three-digit magnitudes among German-speaking adults, and while the structure of number words still shapes adult performance in particular tasks, as a cost when the mode of response works against it and as an advantage elsewhere (Hayek et al., 2025; Xenidou-Dervou et al., 2024), the costs documented in children are not a permanent feature of adult cognition. Number naming affects how arithmetic is acquired more than how it is eventually performed.

Future directions

Three directions would strengthen this field. One is a stricter control of confounding influences. Comparisons between languages are usually comparisons between countries, schools and socioeconomic conditions as well, and cultural values are themselves associated with differences in performance on tasks that use no language, such as judging one's own accuracy on mental rotation (Ordin et al., 2024), so statistical control for these variables is necessary before an effect can be attributed to the language itself. Another is attention to interindividual variation. Speakers of the same language differ in how consistently they use its constructions, and that consistency affects the power to detect any influence of the language on cognition. The individual's baseline biases, in language and in the other domain under study, deserve to be measured (Montero-Melis, 2021). A third is a closer look at differences within regions and language families (Bernabeu & Tillman, 2019). Quechua, for instance, has space-time metaphors that resemble, without matching, those of Aymara (Sinha & Bernárdez, 2015). Could the differences between these neighbouring languages translate into cognitive differences? Research resources cannot be spent on every minor contrast, but the scope of the variation should be mapped before the coarse dichotomies adopted in earlier work, English against Mandarin or English against Aymara, are taken as the units of analysis.

Where this leaves the question

Language has some influence on the way we perceive and organise time and numerical magnitude, and the influence is small in size and broad in scope. It operates as one influence among the cognitive and environmental factors that shape a speaker, and it interacts with them throughout. Investigations that keep spurious influences under control and cover the full range of crosslinguistic and interindividual variation are now feasible, and they are what the field needs next. Future research may examine how bilingualism, cultural exposure and education further shape these processes. If language can shift the way we see time and numbers by this much, what other influences might it have on our minds that we have yet to measure?

References

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