Learning to comprehend and explain spatial metaphors for time in Chinese

Time is frequently structured in terms of motion as moving-time (e.g., "summer is coming"), moving-ego (e.g., "we approach winter"), or sequence-as-position (e.g., "winter follows autumn") across the world's languages, including Chinese - a language that shows greater variability in its expression of such metaphors. Using a metaphor explanation and a metaphor comprehension task, we tested 60 children learning Chinese, equally divided into ages 3-4, 5-6, 7-8. Children's performance improved with age, marking ages 7-8 as the period with significant gains in both comprehension and explanation of metaphors - a later mastery compared to children learning English shown in earlier work. Metaphor type also affected children's performance, but only for the explanation and <i>not</i> the comprehension of metaphors. Overall, our findings highlight that the structure of spatial metaphors for time in Chinese influences the <i>timing</i> but <i>not the trajectory</i> of children's development in learning spatial metaphors for time.