Large-Scale Bitext Corpora Provide New Evidence for Cognitive Representations of Spatial Terms

Peter Viechnicki, Kevin Duh, Anthony Kostacos, Barbara Landau

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Recent evidence from cognitive science suggests that there exist two classes of cognitive representations within the spatial terms of a language, one represented geometrically (e.g., above, below) and the other functionally (e.g., on, in). It has been hypothesized that geometric terms are more constrained and are mastered relatively early in language learning, whereas functional terms are less constrained and are mastered over longer time periods (Landau, 2016). One consequence of this hypothesis is that these two classes should exhibit different cross-linguistic variability, which is supported by human elicitation studies. In this work we present to our knowledge the first corpus-based empirical test of this hypothesis. We develop a pipeline for extracting, isolating, and aligning spatial terms in basic locative constructions from parallel text. Using Shannon entropy to measure the variability of spatial term use across eight languages, we find supporting evidence that variability in functional terms differs significantly from that of geometric terms. We also perform latent variable modeling and find support for the division of spatial terms into geometric and functional classes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEACL 2024 - 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
EditorsYvette Graham, Matthew Purver, Matthew Purver
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1089-1099
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760882
StatePublished - 2024
Event18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2024 - St. Julian�s, Malta
Duration: Mar 17 2024Mar 22 2024

Publication series

NameEACL 2024 - 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
Volume1

Conference

Conference18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2024
Country/TerritoryMalta
CitySt. Julian�s
Period3/17/243/22/24

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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