Swedish, Spanish, time perception

 Swedish and Spanish

A study claimed that language can influence how one estimates time. The study considered three groups: those who spoke only Swedish, those who spoke only Spanish and bilingual speakers who spoke both of those languages. Swedish speakers describe time using distance terms like "long" or "short" while Spanish speakers do it using quantity related terms like "much" or "little". The researchers asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed while watching a line growing across a screen, or a container being filled, or both. The researchers stated that "When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity." When the bilinguals were prompted with the word duración (the Spanish word for duration) they based their time estimates of how full the containers were, ignoring the growing lines. When prompted with the word tid (the Swedish word for duration), they estimated the time elapsed solely by the distance the lines had traveled