english speakers vs chinese speakers - 
   english horizontal; chinese - vertical 
[Boroditsky 2000]


@article{richardson-spivey-03_spatial-representations-activated-by-verbs,
  title={Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs},
  author={Richardson, D.C. and Spivey, M.J. and Barsalou, L.W. and McRae, K.},
  journal={Cognitive science},
  volume={27},
  number={5},
  pages={767--780},
  year={2003},
  publisher={Elsevier}, 
  abstract = {

Previous research has shown that naı̈ve participants display a high level of
agreement when asked to choose or draw schematic representations, or image
schemas, of concrete and abstract verbs [Proceedings of the 23rd Annual
Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2001, Erlbaum, Mawhah, NJ,
p. 873]. For example, participants tended to ascribe a horizontal image
schema to push, and a vertical image schema to respect. This consistency in
offline data is preliminary evidence that language invokes spatial forms of
representation. It also provided norms that were used in the present research
to investigate the activation of spatial image schemas during online language
comprehension. We predicted that if comprehending a verb activates a spatial
representation that is extended along a particular horizontal or vertical
axis, it will affect other forms of spatial processing along that
axis. Participants listened to short sentences while engaged in a visual
discrimination task (Experiment 1) and a picture memory task (Experiment
2). In both cases, reaction times showed an interaction between the
horizontal/vertical nature of the verb’s image schema, and the
horizontal/vertical position of the visual stimuli. We argue that such
spatial effects of verb comprehension provide evidence for the
perceptual–motor character of linguistic representations.

}}

@inproceedings{boroditsky1999first,
  title={First-Language Thinking for Second-Language Understanding: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conception of Time},
  author={Boroditsky, L.},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Twenty First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
  year={1999}
}

Gentner Language