The mental timeline during the processing of linguistic information

Our research demonstrates that spatial concepts are activated while participants process time-related information in sentences. Specifically, processing of temporal sentence information produces a space-time congruency effect on reaction time for responses arranged on the left-right axis and also for responses that consist of movements along the back-front axis. These findings are consistent with the view that time runs from left to right or from back to front. However, the results of our experiments indicate that these spatial concepts become only activated during the processing of sentences when time is a task-relevant dimension but not when time is task-irrelevant. According to this pattern of results, we have concluded that spatial concepts are not always required for the processing of temporal sentence information. In more general terms, these results cast doubt on the prevailing assumption within the framework of grounded cognition that linguistic processes need to tap sensory and motor processes in order to enable natural language understanding.