Rights statement: 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
Accepted author manuscript, 1.29 MB, PDF document
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Spatial language and converseness
AU - Burigo, Michele
AU - Coventry, Kenny R.
AU - Cangelosi, Angelo
AU - Lynott, Dermot Joseph
N1 - 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
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Spatial language
KW - Spatial relations
KW - Inference
KW - Converseness
KW - Acceptability rating task
U2 - 10.1080/17470218.2015.1124894
DO - 10.1080/17470218.2015.1124894
M3 - Journal article
VL - 69
SP - 2319
EP - 2337
JO - The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
JF - The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
SN - 1747-0218
IS - 12
ER -