The long and small of it: language shapes duration estimation in speakers of English and Greek

Does the way people talk about time affect how they think about it? Whereas English speakers describe the duration of events most often in terms of spatial length (e.g., a long night), Greek speakers tend to talk about duration in terms of multidimensional spatial size (e.g., mia megali nychta, tr. a big night) or amount (e.g., poli ora, tr. much time). After quantifying these linguistic patterns, we gave non-linguistic tests of duration estimation to English and Greek speakers. English speakers’ estimates were influenced more strongly by irrelevant length information and Greek speakers’ by irrelevant amount information, consistent with verbal metaphors for duration in English and Greek. Next, we tested duration estimation with concurrent verbal interference, to confirm that the observed effects did not depend on participants verbally labeling the stimuli during the task. Finally, we trained English speakers to use Greek-like metaphors for duration, which resulted in Greek-like performance on a non-linguistic duration estimation task. Results show that (a) people who talk about time differently also think about it differently, (b) these effects are not due to participants’ using verbal labels during the task, and (c) language can play a causal role in shaping even basic non-linguistic mental representations of time.