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Abstract Abstract: Two Experiments were carried out to testify a hypothesis of “Thinking Affects Language Processing” proposed in this study. To be specific, Experiments 1 and 2 focused on the influence of Chinese and English speakers’ temporal thinking patterns on their L1 processing and L2 processing respectively. Each participant needed to complete the temporal arrangement task and the priming task. The temporal arrangement task, in which participants were asked to arrange in order a series of pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events, aimed to elicit how participants tended to represent time. In the priming task, participants were asked to successively verify a horizontal or vertical nonlinguistic prime and a linguistic target sentence depicting a temporal order. The purpose of the priming task was to measure the effect of the nonlinguistic graphic prime on participants’ processing of the linguistic target. Results demonstrate that: 1) The habitual ways of thinking exerted profound effects on L1 processing. Both the Chinese and English participants who tended to perceive time in terms of a horizontal axis were faster to verify a temporal target sentence after a horizontal prime than after a vertical prime. Likewise, the Chinese participants who showed salient vertical bias for temporal thinking were faster to verify a temporal target sentence after a vertical prime than after a horizontal prime. 2) The habitual ways of thinking also exerted significant influences on L2 processing. Taken together, the findings provide evidence in support of “Thinking Affects Language Processing” hypothesis.
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