If time is conceived of as a river, we either have the perspective of seeing ourselves as moving downstream toward the future (e.g., “We are approaching the future,” called ego moving), or we have the perspective of the future as moving upstream toward us (e.g., “The future is approaching,” called time moving). Most ego- and time-moving studies have been conducted by using an English ego/time-moving ambiguous question to implicitly measure a person’s current time perspective (ego vs. time moving). In the current study, we replicate previous findings that in (Standard) German the time-perspective question is not ambiguous, while showing as a new finding that it is ambiguous in Swiss German. We attribute this difference to different normative uses in these two German variants. To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate dialectal differences in relation to cognitive processing of ego-/time-moving metaphors. Psychological and linguistic implications are discussed.

中文翻译：

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“下周三的会议已经提前两天了”

如果时间被认为是一条河流，我们要么将自己视为向下游向未来移动（例如，“我们正在接近未来”，称为自我移动），要么我们将未来视为向上游移动向我们走来（例如，“未来正在临近”，称为时间移动）。大多数自我和时间移动研究都是通过使用英语自我/时间移动模棱两可的问题来隐含地衡量一个人当前的时间观点（自我与时间移动）进行的。在当前的研究中，我们重复了之前的发现，即在（标准）德语中，时间透视问题并不含糊，而作为一项新发现，它在瑞士德语中是含糊不清的。我们将这种差异归因于这两种德语变体中不同的规范使用。据我们所知，这项研究首次调查了与自我/时间移动隐喻的认知加工相关的方言差异。讨论了心理和语言的影响。