Me: Rose, you actually study the impacts of language on conceptions of space and time - how crazy is it that this movie touches your research so closely?! What kinds of things have you discovered through your research about how language influences our concepts of space and time?

Also I’ve been wondering – Is it language that influences how we understand time, or rather is it how we experience time as humans that has influenced the languages we have produced?

Rose: Yessssss, I was freaking out, or rather geeking out, internally during the movie and then externally for the week following. The chicken and egg problem you describe has actually been the focus of much of my research. The short answer is: both! Language shapes how we think about time, and how we think about time shapes how we talk about it. I've been working to empirically show both.

Most (maybe all) languages we know of tend to use spatial words to talk about time. Since time is not a thing we can see or touch, it's useful to have something concrete to grab onto when talking and thinking about it. But different languages use different aspects of space to talk about time. In English, the future is in front of us ("the times ahead") and the past is behind ("putting the past behind us”). In Aymara, an indigenous language spoken in South America, this convention is reversed: the future is behind and the past is ahead (this is the paper). This is how they talk about time, and their gestures suggest this is how they think about time as well.

But to know that language really causes people to think in consistent ways, we need a true experiment, and cross-cultural research is necessarily only quasi-experimental. We would need to randomly assign people to conditions, but we can't randomly assign them to be a native speaker of one language or another. To address this, we create new systems of metaphors and teach them to people in the lab. In some of my work, English speakers learn metaphors like "breakfast is above dinner" or "breakfast is below dinner." Then we measure their vertical mental timelines by asking them to make decisions about different events in time. People are faster to make decisions when we set the main task up to be consistent with their newly learned metaphors (e.g. the key on the keyboard they need to use to respond that one event happened earlier than another is above the key to respond that the event happened later), suggesting that they do have new mental timelines because of learning a new way to speak. A link to a paper on this is here.

We’ve also seen examples of our mental timelines becoming encoded in language. I mentioned that English speakers hold left-to-right mental timelines, but we don't always talk about it that way. It would be weird to say "Wednesday is to the right of Tuesday." BUT we found that members of the US military actually do use some left to right metaphors that civilians don't. In some military cultures, it's entirely normal to say "we'll push the meeting to the right from Tuesday to Wednesday." This is a reverse process from the one I've engineered in the lab – they already have common mental timelines, and it seems that they've put those into language (probably to reduce ambiguity, and perhaps also as a result of using tools like calendars that actually lay out time left to right). We still have lots of questions about what's going on there. Like, are there cognitive benefits of talking about time on the left-right axis? Why don't civilians do that? Instead we say things like "Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days," which is ambiguous to English speakers (Here's some work on that).

Me: Are there any human languages that look similar to the type of written language the aliens use in Arrival (in other words, languages that are non-linear or where the written symbols convey meaning, not sounds?)

Rose: None that I know of. Most of the languages in the world don't have writing systems at all - they're just oral. But of the ones with writing systems, they can be written in different directions, but the ones we’ve documented are always linear. That makes the cyclical writing system even more perfect for this sci-fi film.