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The effects of direction and orientation of located objects on spatial language comprehension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2018

MICHELE BURIGO Open the ORCID record for MICHELE BURIGO [Opens in a new window]  and
HOLGER SCHULTHEIS Open the ORCID record for HOLGER SCHULTHEIS [Opens in a new window]
MICHELE BURIGO*
Affiliation:
University of Bielefeld
HOLGER SCHULTHEIS
Affiliation:
University of Bremen
*
†Address for correspondence: Michele Burigo, Cognitive Interaction Technology Excellence Center (CITEC) – University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany; e-mail: mburigo@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de
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Abstract

Spatial descriptions such as “The spider is behind the bee” inform the listener about the location of the spider (the located object) in relation to an object whose location is known (i.e., the bee, also called the reference object). If the geometric properties of the reference object have been shown to affect how people use and understand spatial language (Carlson & Van Deman, 2008; Carlson-Radvansky & Irwin, 1994), the geometric features carried by the located object have been deemed irrelevant for spatial language (Landau, 1996; Talmy, 1983). This view on the (ir)relevance of the located object has been recently questioned by works showing that presenting the located object in misalignment with the reference object has consequences for spatial language understanding (Burigo, Coventry, Cangelosi, & Lynott, 2016; Burigo & Sacchi, 2013). In the reported study we aimed to investigate which geometric properties of the located object affect the apprehension of a spatial description, and to disentangle whether the information concerning its orientation (axis), direction (front/rear), or a combination of the two gives rise to conflict. The outcomes of three placing tasks suggest that only the information concerning the direction of the located object is critical for spatial language use.

Keywords

spatial languagedirectionorientationplacing taskaxes of symmetryaxes of elongation
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 298 - 328
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Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2018 

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Footnotes

*

Michele Burigo works at the Cognitive Interaction Technology Excellence Center (CITEC), University of Bielefeld, Germany. Holger Schultheis, Department of Informatics, University of Bremen. The work reported in this paper was conducted in the scope of the Bremen Spatial Cognition Center and the project R1-[ImageSpace] of the Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition. This research was also supported by the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology ‘CITEC’ (EXC 277) at Bielefeld University, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We are grateful to Anna-Lena Zurmhülen for her help in running the experiments.

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