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Abstract
People spend a significant portion of their daily lives detached from the present, mentally traveling through time to relive past experiences or imagine future scenarios. This ability to project oneself through time serves several crucial adaptive functions, including guiding decision-making, facilitating planning and goal-setting, regulating emotions, and supporting the formation and maintenance of a coherent sense of self. It is, therefore, essential to understand the factors that influence this process. Among these, language plays a particularly significant role. Language is not merely a tool for communicating our mental time travel experiences to others, but it also acts as a vessel through which we travel through time and therefore, it directly affects the experience itself. Yet, the influence of one of the most salient features of language, its nativeness, has not been systematically examined. Given that nearly half of the world’s population speaks more than one language, it is important to understand how using a native versus a foreign language affects the experience of mental time travel. In this dissertation, I investigate how language nativeness influences a key aspect of mental time travel, which is the perceived distance of past and future events, across speakers of English, Chinese, Korean, German, and Italian. In Chapter 1, I report experiments demonstrating that using a foreign language, compared to a native tongue, makes past events feel more temporally distant. In Chapter 2, I present experiments showing that imagining a future scenario in a foreign language increases its perceived distance by making it feel less likely to occur. In both chapters, I also explore two competing accounts of the underlying mechanism. One account proposes that the effect of foreign language use on perceived distance is an indirect consequence of known correlates of foreign language processing, such as reduced emotionality, fluency, and vividness of imagery. The alternative account suggests that language functions as an overarching context that directly influences mental simulations. The findings are consistent with the latter account, and they rule out the account that assumes that the foreign language effect on perceived distance results from reductions in emotionality, fluency, or vividness of imagery. Finally, in Chapter 3, I turn to the real-world implications of these effects. Perceptions of the distance of past and future events are consequential, as they may influence how urgent, relevant, or important those events seem. This, in turn, can affect present-day decisions and behaviors that rely on mental simulations of those events. I test two potential consequences in this chapter: (1) forgiveness motivation, and (2) intention to prepare for environmental threats. The two domains hinge on how people interpret the temporal distance of past events and the likelihood of future events, respectively. For example, perceiving a past transgression as more distant may facilitate forgiveness, while perceiving a future environmental threat as less likely to occur may reduce intention to prepare. Although the distancing effect of foreign language does not replicate in these applied contexts, the findings raise important questions about when language affects perception of distance. Together, this research reveals how language context influences mental time travel by influencing the perceived distance of the past and future, offering new insights into the cognitive processes of the multilingual mind. As people routinely rely on past memories and future simulations to navigate daily life, and increasingly do so in a foreign language, these findings also carry broad implications for an interconnected, multilingual world.