11 Mental models of spatial relations and transformations from language

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on two experiments testing the efficacy of language to evoke spatial transformations. The results support the claim that people's experience of their bodies interacting with the spatial world underlies their mental representations of space, which in turn support the comprehension of spatial language. The results also add support to the claim that people's mental representations of space are not like the internalized perceptions of space but depend rather on the people's conceptions of space. Exploring spatial imagination through description is simpler technically than exploring spatial imagination through experience. In many cases, the effects are the same. Because in the normal course of events people move through stationary environments, it was expected that describing people as stationary and environments as moving would be more difficult to comprehend than describing people as moving in stationary environments. Moreover, research relevant to the nature of mental representations of spatial transformations from discourse come from research on imagery.