TY - GEN
T1 - Spatial language, spatial thought
T2 - International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2005
AU - Landau, Barbara
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - A hallmark of human cognition is our capacity to talk about what we see- especially, the objects, motions and events around us. How is this accomplished? Given that language and spatial representations are likely to be quite different in kind, the challenge is to understand how such apparently different systems of knowledge map onto each other, and how these mappings are learned. One solution is to seek core communalities in the structure of linguistic and non-linguistic representations, which could afford learners and mature users a means for talking about their spatial experience. I will discuss this possibility with respect to the structure of paths within events. Over a broad range of event types, formal linguistic analyses, computational models, and experimental studies show that a fundamental property of path representation-an asymmetry between source and goal paths-is pervasive in our non-linguistic understanding of events as well as our encoding of these in language. This suggests that there are deep structural homomorphisms between spatial language and non-linguistic spatial representation. Such structural parallels may provide a partial solution to the problem of mapping dissimilar domains onto each other, and may even yield insight into how some aspects of language evolved.
AB - A hallmark of human cognition is our capacity to talk about what we see- especially, the objects, motions and events around us. How is this accomplished? Given that language and spatial representations are likely to be quite different in kind, the challenge is to understand how such apparently different systems of knowledge map onto each other, and how these mappings are learned. One solution is to seek core communalities in the structure of linguistic and non-linguistic representations, which could afford learners and mature users a means for talking about their spatial experience. I will discuss this possibility with respect to the structure of paths within events. Over a broad range of event types, formal linguistic analyses, computational models, and experimental studies show that a fundamental property of path representation-an asymmetry between source and goal paths-is pervasive in our non-linguistic understanding of events as well as our encoding of these in language. This suggests that there are deep structural homomorphisms between spatial language and non-linguistic spatial representation. Such structural parallels may provide a partial solution to the problem of mapping dissimilar domains onto each other, and may even yield insight into how some aspects of language evolved.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33646155123&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/11556114_32
DO - 10.1007/11556114_32
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33646155123
SN - 354028964X
SN - 9783540289647
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 492
BT - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Y2 - 14 September 2005 through 18 September 2005
ER -