Spatial language: Meaning, use, and lexical choice

Kristen Johannes, Barbara Landau

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

Abstract

Accounts of spatial language aim to address both the meaning of a spatial term and its usage patterns across diverse cases, but do not always clearly distinguish these from one another. Focusing on the case of English prepositions in and on, we set out to disentangle spatial language meaning from spatial language use by comparing judgments on a series of linguistic tasks designed to tap each aspect of spatial language. We demonstrate that judgments of truth-conditional meaning and patterns of naturalistic use show different distributional signatures, with judgments of meaning giving rise to a more uniform distribution than use patterns. We explore a third aspect of spatial language: lexical choice, and propose that choice is a key factor in shaping the distribution of spatial expression use. Our analyses reveal that the distribution of lexical choice judgments is highly correlated with the distribution of expression use in spatial descriptions for the same spatial scenes, supporting a model of spatial language that differs from traditional accounts of meaning and categorization.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Subtitle of host publicationComputational Foundations of Cognition
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages2308-2313
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780991196760
StatePublished - 2017
Event39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition, CogSci 2017 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: Jul 26 2017Jul 29 2017

Publication series

NameCogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition

Conference

Conference39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition, CogSci 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period7/26/177/29/17

Keywords

  • language use
  • semantics
  • Spatial cognition
  • spatial language

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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