فصلنامه روانشناسی شناختی

One of the well-known conceptual metaphors is the metaphor of "time as space". Time as an abstract concept is conceptualized by a concrete concept like space. This conceptualization of time is also reflected in co-speech gestures. In this research, we try to find out what dimension and direction the mental timeline takes in co-speech gestures and under which metaphorical sources of space it takes place. For this purpose, six possible metaphorical sources adopted from space on three axes of sagittal, lateral, and vertical in six spatial directions were examined on the words tomorrow and yesterday. Participants were 137 students ranging in age from 18 to 30. The frequency of occurrence and the average percentage in co-speech gestures showed that the horizontal-sagittal axis back to front adopted from metaphorical-spatial source of linguistic metaphors with 55.75%; and right to left horizontal-lateral axis adopted from metaphorical-spatial source of Persian writing direction with 30.1% were the two influential factors in activating these dimensions and directions. The results of this study showed that language can play an important role in the representation of the mental timeline in co-speech gestures through the embodied sensory-motor experiences that we have from language as a conventional-cultural artifact in writing or linguistic metaphors.

In this research, the horizontal and vertical direction of the time line in the minds of Persian speakers is examined from the perspective of Lakoff and Johnson conceptual metaphors. The mental timeline as an abstract concept according to our cognitive experiences and embodied mind may be conceptualized metaphorically under the influence of concrete concepts of space in our mind. In this research, a type of experimental experiment in the form of arranging colored cubes of time is used in different dimensions and possible directions in the concepts of the days of the week, including Saturday, Sunday, and Monday; the three main meals that include breakfast, lunch and dinner; and the concept of time that includes the yesterday, today and tomorrow. A total of 45 male and female employees between the age of 27 and 45 from the Islamic Azad University of Khorramshahr-Persian Gulf International Branch participated in this experiment. Percentage and average frequency of sorting colored cubes in the three concepts of time showed that, respectively, the horizontal lateral axes from right to left are adopted from the writing direction of Persian language with 45.6% as the first; the horizontal axis of the back-front paradigm is taken from the walking and looking direction, and linguistic metaphors, with 25.7% as the second; and the horizontal  axis left to right taken from the writing direction of numbers and mathematics with 14.6% are considered as the third adopted sources of abstract concepts of time in Persian. The results show that in the minds of Persian speakers, the cognitive experience for writing the language due to repetition and sensory-motor experience is still represented as the most dominant pattern, and after this pattern walking and looking forward has a considerable affects on the representation of the direction of mental timeline.