Writing direction affects how people map space onto time.

What determines which spatial axis people use to represent time? We investigate effects of writing direction. English, like Mandarin Chinese in mainland China, is written left to right and then top to bottom. But in Taiwan, characters are written predominantly top to bottom and then right to left.

Body part representations in verbal semantics.

Embodied theories of language propose that word meaning is inextricably tied to-grounded in-mental representations of perceptual, motor, and affective experiences of the world. The four experiments described in this article demonstrate that accessing the meanings of action verbs like smile, punch, and kick requires language understanders to activate modality-specific cognitive representations responsible for performing and perceiving those same actions. The main task used is a word-image matching task, where participants see an action verb and an image depicting an action.