Aim

1. Boroditsky (2001) asked whether the spatial language a person speaks shapes the way they think about time.
2. English talks about time horizontally, in words such as before and after, while Mandarin does this too but also talks about it vertically, using words that mean up and down.

Procedure

1. The participants were 26 native English speakers and 20 native Mandarin speakers, all of them Stanford students, and every one of them was tested in English.
2. On screen they first saw two spatial prime statements, which were either horizontal, such as the black ball being ahead of the white ball, or vertical, such as one ball being above another, and each had to be judged true or false within a five-second limit.
3. A target question about time then followed, either a spatiotemporal one using a spatial word, as in March comes before April, or a purely temporal one using none, as in March is earlier than April.
4. The measure was response time, recorded in milliseconds.

Results

1. On the spatiotemporal targets both groups behaved the same way, answering faster after a horizontal prime, and it was on the purely temporal targets that they came apart.
2. The English speakers were faster after horizontal primes, at 2128 ms against 2300 ms.
3. The Mandarin speakers were faster after vertical primes, at 2347 ms against 2503 ms.
4. The Mandarin speakers showed the vertical advantage while being tested entirely in English, so the effect cannot be put down to the language of the task.

Conclusion

1. A person's native language shapes their habitual way of thinking about time, and that habit persists even when they are working in another language.
2. This supports soft linguistic relativity, where language influences thought.
3. It does not support the stronger claim that language fixes thought, because both groups answered the same questions and the only difference was how quickly they did it.

Strengths

1. A strength is that it is an experiment with an objective measure, since response time is recorded by a machine in milliseconds and no researcher has to interpret it.
2. A second strength is the cross-linguistic comparison, because the two groups differ in native language while doing an identical task in the same language.

Weaknesses

1. A weakness is that being primed with sentences about balls on a screen and then answering questions about months is an artificial task, so it is a long way from how anyone actually thinks about time.
2. A second weakness is that later attempts to reproduce the effect have given mixed results, which raises a real question about how reliable it is.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the two groups, the two prime directions and the two kinds of target, and say that everyone was tested in English.
2. Quote the purely temporal times, 2128 ms against 2300 ms for English speakers and 2347 ms against 2503 ms for Mandarin speakers.
3. The mark most often lost comes from reversing the direction, so check that English is the horizontal group and Mandarin the vertical one.