We seek to investigate whether the use of space metaphors to describe time in a given language influences the way native speakers reason about durations. Previous studies (Casasanto et al.,2004, 2007) suggest that speakers of languages using distance metaphors (e.g., ‘long’ time) to describe time encode durations differently from speakers of languages using amount metaphors(e.g., ‘a lot’ of time). We intend to assess whether these different mental representations affect the way adults calculate durations. To do so, we used arithmetic word problems admitting two different solving strategies. Previous work has shown that individuals’ strategy choice depends on whether they perceive the ordinality or the cardinality of the numbers in the problems (Gros et al.,2021). Problems involving durations have been shown to lead to ordinal encodings in French(Gros et al., 2021), a distance-metaphor language. We propose to evaluate whether this remainsthe case in other languages, depending on their use of distance or amount metaphors to talk about time. First, we conducted a linguistic analysis using Sketch Engine to identify languages predominantly using either ‘distance’ or ‘amount’ metaphors to talk about time. We investigated12 different languages and selected four: English and French as predominantly distance-metaphor languages and Spanish and Portuguese as amount-metaphor languages. Second, we designed across-linguistic experiment on Qualtrics to evaluate how native speakers of those four languages would solve problems involving durations, compared to problems involving other quantities(height, collection, and price problems). We set out to recruit 1200 participants, 300 per language,using Prolific. Each participant was instructed, in their native language, to solve 12 problems using the fewest possible number of steps. Using GLMM, we compare the use of both available strategies depending on problem type and spoken language. Our results provide insights into the debate on linguistic relativism.