Spatial language and converseness

Abstract

Typical spatial language sentences consist of describing the location of an object (the located object) in relation to another object (the reference object) as in "The book is above the vase". While it has been suggested that the properties of the located object (the book) are not translated into language because they are irrelevant when exchanging location information, it has been shown that the orientation of the located object affects the production and comprehension of spatial descriptions. In line with the claim that spatial language apprehension involves inferences about relations that hold between objects it has been suggested that during spatial language apprehension people use the orientation of the located object to evaluate whether the logical property of converseness (e.g., if "the book is above the vase" is true, then also "the vase is below the book" must be true) holds across the objects' spatial relation. In three experiments using sentence acceptability rating tasks we tested this hypothesis and demonstrated that when converseness is violated people's acceptability ratings of a scene's description are reduced indicating that people do take into account geometric properties of the located object and use it to infer logical spatial relations.

Social and configural effects on the cognitive dynamics of perspective-taking

“…The impact of configural cues on the selection of perspective strategy is consistent with prior work showing that such cues can determine the preferred perspective or "organizing direction" of maintaining spatial information in memory, as reflected by the ease with which people reason from different imagined perspectives when making judgments about previously studied scenes (Marchette & Shelton, 2010;Mou & McNamara, 2002;Richard & Waller, 2013). The present work also extends previous work on "reference frame selection" during the interpretation of individual spatial descriptions (e.g., Burigo & Sacchi, 2013;Burigo, Coventry, Cangelosi & Lynott, 2016;Carlson & Van Deman, 2008) We acknowledge that there may be an inconsistency between what we, the researchers, took to be an other-aligned cue, and what the participants in Experiment 2 may have taken to be response relevant. There may be considerable variability in how individuals perceive such stimuli, and how they make use of the directional and configural cues contained in those stimuli across different types of tasks.…”

“…A reference frame, in its broadest characterization, is thought to be a representation of a coordinate system for organizing spatial relations, consisting of a set of axes that define space and including parameters such as an origin, scale, direction, and orientation (Logan & Sadler, 1996). A confluence of evidence suggests that geometric properties of objects that are part of spatial configurations play an important role in how people use and interpret spatial descriptions (Burigo & Sacchi, 2013;Burigo, Coventry, Cangelosi & Lynott, 2016;Carlson & Van Deman, 2008;Carlson-Radvansky & Irwin, 1994;Carlson-Radvansky & Logan, 1997). For instance, when objects are presented in non-canonical vs. canonical orientations (e.g., an "upside-down" pumpkin), language users take longer to formulate descriptions of those scenes or to respond to instructions (e.g., "the pumpkin is above the strawberry") by placing objects at the correct location (Burigo & Sacchi, 2013).…”

Are Categorical Spatial Relations Encoded by Shifting Visual Attention between Objects?

“…Consistent with this view, the current study suggests that isolating individual objects and shifting attention between them plays an important role in categorical spatial representation [ 12 ]. While both of these two lines of research emphasize the process, or temporal sequence, of relational processing, given sufficient time, people should be able to extract multiple forms of relational representations (e.g., above and below) utilizing a variety of coding systems [ 79 , 80 ].…”

Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing

“…For instance, Alhama et al (2015) recently proposed to use confidence ratings to assess models of artificial language learning. Likewise, in research on the evaluation of spatial language given visual displays, a common experimental paradigm is to ask how well a spatial term describes a depicted situation (e.g., Regier and Carlson, 2001;Logan and Sadler, 1996;Burigo et al, 2016;Hörberg, 2008). This paradigm results in individual acceptability judgments on Likert scales.…”