|Question 13Verbal

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Rafael Núñez and colleagues studied how members of the Yupno, an Indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, conceptualize time. The researchers recorded Yupno speakers explaining certain temporal words and phrases, such as kalip si ngan, a past-oriented expression that translates to "a long time ago," and coded each speaker's manual gestures. Previous research has found a tendency in many cultures to make temporal distinctions using spatial concepts and gestures, particularly along egocentric axes (i.e., relative to the orientation of the speaker): for instance, English speakers often refer to the front/back axis to describe events in time. In an anthropology paper, a student claims that the tendency toward ego-based conceptualizations of time is universal.
Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken the student's claim?
Some Yupno grammatical structures used when talking about time are also used in English.
A
When Yupno speakers who are outdoors use gestures to refer to the future, they point uphill from their current location regardless of which way they are facing.
B
A Yupno speaker points in opposite directions when indicating a past event versus a future event.
C
Although Yupno speakers and English speakers both use gestures to indicate orientation in time, Yupno speakers tend to use fewer gestures overall when speaking than English speakers do.
D