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Will it really happen? Disambiguating of the hypothetical and real “Next Wednesday's meeting” question in Mandarin speakers

Heng Li

Published 2020 in Lingua

ABSTRACT

Previous research has consistently shown that Mandarin speakers tended to adopt the Moving Time perspective when addressing the “Next Wednesday's meeting” question. Using the revised paradigm, Experiment 1 found that Mandarin speakers showed no preference for either the ego-moving perspective or the time-moving perspective when reading the single verb “移动(move)” which lacks a precise spatial meaning, suggesting that the temporal ambiguity of the probe is rooted in the directional neutrality of the verb. Experiment 2 proceeded to use this ambiguous phrase to investigate whether Mandarin speakers’ responses to the hypothetical probe are predicative of the rescheduling decisions they would make in real life. The results indicate that people's temporal reasoning in real life contexts can dramatically diverge from their thinking in hypothetical scenarios because people tend to put off the meeting until a later time to ease the inconvenience in real rescheduling management practice. Furthermore, the correlations between temporal perspective preference and individual-differences measures were only found for the hypothetical-condition samples. However, by providing real contextual information available to participants when responding to a hypothetical question—thereby reducing the need for mental simulation—we brought people's responses into concordance with their answers in real situations (Experiment 3). This is the first experimental demonstration that hypothetical disambiguation studies, while a valuable contribution to our understanding of time cognition, fail to capture the most salient motivational force shaping actual temporal thinking because of the decontextualized nature.

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