Spatial Language and Children’s Spatial Landmark Use

Spatial Language and Landmark Use: Can 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds find the Middle?

Evidence suggests that (a) young children have difficulty reasoning about spatial relations, and that (b) spatial language can facilitate their performance (Loewenstein & Gentner, 2005). This study investigates children’s ability to reason about a particular spatial relation, middle, which we hypothesize may be particularly challenging. We ask when children become able to encode the middle and ...

SPATIAL LANGUAGE AND CONVERSENESS 1 Spatial Language

Spatial language: Meaning, use, and lexical choice

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 as...

Acquisition of Landmark Knowledge from Spatial Description

Maps and spatial descriptions are two different styles in expressing geographical information. Each style has its own merits and demerits. When information is given in one style, it is sometimes required to convert it to the other style. A vast amount of spatial descriptions are available electronically, especially on the World Wide Web. If geographical knowledge extracted from spatial descript...

Spatial Schemata and Language

If we want to understand how semantic information is represented and processed, there are two possible paths to take. The first, and the most common, is to study the intricacies of language and try to infer the underlying mechanisms. The second approach is to investigate language from inside out by questioning how semantic structure is represented without reference to language. Only when the se...