The present study intends to look into the motivation of the ordering distributions of temporal adverbial clauses demonstrated by English native speakers牞 Chinese native speakers and advanced Chinese EFL learners. It is found that the distributions are strikingly different in English and Chinese. Three main findings are presented in the study as follows. Firstly, the English language is inclined to have their occurrence in the sentence-final position; secondly, the Chinese language is disposed to have their occurrence in the sentence-initial position; thirdly, advanced Chinese EFL learners prefer to place temporal adverbial clauses in the sentence-initial position, which deviates from the dominant English sentence construction. Such an acquisition behavior is not only relevant to language transfer on the surface, but also related to conceptualization transfer in the deep level, and it is much more underlyingly associated with thinking-mode transfer, with its root cause lying in the fundamental difference between the English preference for pro-temporality and the Chinese preference for pro-spatiality, which is observed by Wang Wenbin (2013a, 2013b, 2019).