The spatial and temporal meanings of English prepositions can be independently impaired

English uses the same prepositions to describe both spatial and temporal relationships (e.g., at the corner, at 1:30), and other languages worldwide exhibit similar patterns. These space-time parallelisms have been explained by the Metaphoric Mapping Theory, which maintains that humans have a cognitive predisposition to structure temporal concepts in terms of spatial schemas through the application of a TIME IS SPACE metaphor. Evidence comes from (among other sources) historical investigations showing that languages consistently develop in such a way that expressions that originally have only spatial meanings are gradually extended to take on analogous temporal meanings. It is not clear, however, if the metaphor actively influences the way that modem adults process prepositional meanings during language use. To explore this question, a series of experiments was conducted with four brain-damaged subjects with left perisylvian lesions. Two subjects exhibited the following dissociation: they failed a test that assesses knowledge of the spatial meanings of prepositions, but passed a test that assesses knowledge of the corresponding temporal meanings of the same prepositions. This result suggests that understanding the temporal meanings of prepositions does not necessarily require establishing structural alignments with their spatial correlates. Two other subjects exhibited the opposite dissociation: they performed better on the spatial test than on the temporal test. Overall, these findings support the view that although the spatial and temporal meanings of prepositions are historically linked by virtue of the TIME IS SPACE metaphor, they can be (and may normally be) represented and processed independently of each other in the brains of modem adults. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.