Spatial language and converseness

Burigo, Michele and Coventry, Kenny R. and Cangelosi, Angelo and Lynott, Dermot Joseph (2016) Spatial language and converseness. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69 (12). pp. 2319-2337. ISSN 1747-0218

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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.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Additional Information:
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology on 25/02/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17470218.2015.1124894
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3200/3206
Subjects:
?? spatial languagespatial relationsinferenceconversenessacceptability rating taskneuropsychology and physiological psychologygeneral psychologyexperimental and cognitive psychologyphysiologyphysiology (medical)psychology(all) ??
ID Code:
79285
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
18 May 2016 10:32
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
01 Oct 2024 00:14