Graduate School of Social Sciences

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10679/9882

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    Master ThesisPublicationMetadata only
    The length of time and the duration of space: Word learning of spatial and temporal metaphors across auditory and visual modalities
    Tarakçı, Bahar; Ünal, Ercenur; Ünal, Ercenur; Açık, Alper; Göksun, T.; Department of Psychology
    Space and time are highly interconnected domains in language and cognition. Here, we focus on the interactions between the conceptual and linguistic aspects of these domains. We ask to what extent the conceptual and perceptual processes of space and time influence how word meanings are learned and extended across space and time domains. To answer this question, we taught 4-5-year-old and adult native speakers of Turkish a novel word with spatial (i.e., length) or temporal meaning (i.e., duration) and investigated how well they learned and extended the word meaning to the other domain. We manipulated two aspects of learning multiple word meanings of spatial metaphors: (i) the direction of extension and (ii) the modality of temporal perception. Children could learn the spatial meaning of the novel word more easily than the temporal meaning. In fact, they failed to learn the temporal meaning. Although children successfully learned the spatial meaning, they failed to extend this meaning to the time domain. By contrast, adults were able to learn spatial and temporal meanings equally easily. However, they learned the temporal meaning better from the visual modality than from the auditory modality. Once they learned the temporal meaning, they could extend the temporal meaning to the space domain as easily, regardless of time modality; suggesting a facilitative role of polysemy in overcoming modality differences in word learning.