Spatial Language Research Articles

Exploring expressions for cardinal directions in Tshiluba

This paper presents the outcomes of a pilot study that explores expressions for cardinal directions in Tshiluba, a Bantu language primarily spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Language data were collected from a native Tshiluba speaker using three elicitation methods and an online dictionary. The results reveal several potential nomenclatural strategies and conceptual sources that Tshiluba uses to linguistically encode cardinal directions, including references to body parts, geographical and environmental landmarks and features, and celestial bodies and events. Meanwhile, a comprehensive exploration of the inherent characteristics of these Tshiluba cardinal direction expressions remains a subject of further investigation. The paper also includes reflections and suggestions regarding research methodologies on this topic. This paper contributes to cross–linguistic exploration and documentation of cardinal direction expressions, both within and beyond the Bantu language family. It also encourages further research on spatial language as a whole, which is a pursuit of great importance in advancing our understanding of human spatial cognition and our interactions with the external world.

Action Research on Promoting Spatial Skills Development of Older Children in Block Play

Spatial skills are an important part of human intelligence and have a profound impact on children's later learning and development of mathematics, and block play, as one of the most fundamental activities in kindergarten, has a positive effect on the development of children's spatial skills. In order to improve children's spatial skills through block play, this study used an action research paradigm to intervene with 30 children in the experimental and control classes over a period of three months. In quantitative terms, the spatial skills of the children in the experimental class showed significant improvements in comparison with those in the control class. In terms of quality, the children in the experimental class used significantly more spatial language in their block play and their level of construction improved significantly. Problem solving skills were developed and interest in constructing was increased during collaborative construction. Teachers who participated in the action research were less 'resistant' to the role of the teacher in block play, and their ability to use block play as a guide for children's spatial skills development was improved. The collaboration of the research team members was a key factor in the success of the action research. Teachers should use different types of block play to improve children's construction skills. Promote peer block building to bring out the unique value of peer construction. Focus on the role of spatial language and encourage children to use it to communicate.

Does a row of objects comprise a boundary? How children miss the forest for the trees in spatial navigation.

Unlike children's early ability to navigate by continuous boundaries, their ability to extract geometric information from an array of objects emerges gradually over childhood. To investigate children's developing representation of object arrays for navigation and its relation to their mental representation of the global spatial layout, reorientation behavior was tested in 146 children (4-9 years, 78 male children and 68 female children, Italian) with rectangular arrays made up of 20 objects. Posttest questions on children's spatial language and their mental and pictorial representation of the environment were administered. Although children of all ages navigated by the geometry of continuous boundary-like arrays, they only succeeded with separated object arrays at around 7 years of age. This developmental change was predicted by children's individual ability to extract the abstract geometry of the spatial layout in a two-dimensional picture of the room. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Fraction Ball impact on student and teacher math talk and behavior

We assessed the impacts of Fraction Ball—a novel suite of games combining the benefits of embodied guided play for math learning—on the math language production and behavior of students and teachers. In the Pilot Experiment, 69 fifth and sixth graders were randomly assigned to play four different Fraction Ball games or attend normal physical education class. The Efficacy Experiment was implemented to test improvements made through co-design with teachers with 160 fourth through sixth graders. Researchers observed and coded for use of math language and behavior. Playing Fraction Ball resulted in consistent increases of students’ and teachers’ use of fraction (SDs = 0.98–2.42) and decimal (SDs = 0.65–1.64) language and number line arithmetic, but not in whole number, spatial language, counting, instructional gesturing, questioning, and planning. We present evidence of the math language production in physical education and value added by Fraction Ball to support rational number language and arithmetic through group collaboration.

“Dividing the labor”: Lexical verbs and the linguistic encoding of physical support in 2- to 4.5-year-old children

Infants reason about support configurations (e.g., teddy bear on table) and young children talk about a variety of support relations, including support-from-below (e.g., apple on table) and many other types (e.g., Band-Aid on leg, picture on wall). Given this wide variation in support types, we asked whether early differentiation of the semantic space of support may play a key role in helping children to learn spatial language in this domain. Previous research has shown such differentiation with 20-month-olds mapping the basic locative construction (BE on) to support-from-below (cube on top of box), but not to a mechanical support configuration (cube on side of box via adhesion). Older children and adults show the same differentiation, with preferential mapping of BE on to support-from-below and lexical verbs to mechanical support. We further explored the development of this differentiation by testing how children aged 2 to 4.5 years map lexical verbs to a wide variety of support configurations. In Experiment 1, using an intermodal preferential pointing paradigm, we found that 2- to 3.5-year-olds map a lexical verb phrase (“sticks to”) to mechanical support via adhesion. In Experiments 2 and 3, we expanded the range of mechanical support relations and used production and forced-choice tasks to ask whether 2- to 4.5-year-olds also encode mechanical relations using lexical verbs. We found that they do. These findings suggest continuity between infancy and childhood in the way that children use spatial language to differentially map to support-from-below versus mechanical support and raise new questions about how mechanical support language develops.

Spatial communication systems across languages reflect universal action constraints

The extent to which languages share properties reflecting the non-linguistic constraints of the speakers who speak them is key to the debate regarding the relationship between language and cognition. A critical case is spatial communication, where it has been argued that semantic universals should exist, if anywhere. Here, using an experimental paradigm able to separate variation within a language from variation between languages, we tested the use of spatial demonstratives—the most fundamental and frequent spatial terms across languages. In n = 874 speakers across 29 languages, we show that speakers of all tested languages use spatial demonstratives as a function of being able to reach or act on an object being referred to. In some languages, the position of the addressee is also relevant in selecting between demonstrative forms. Commonalities and differences across languages in spatial communication can be understood in terms of universal constraints on action shaping spatial language and cognition.

Holistic Spatial Reasoning for Chinese Spatial Language Understanding

Spatial language understanding (SLU) is an important task in the field of information extraction, and it involves complex spatial analyses and reasoning processes. Unlike English SLU, in the case of the Chinese language, there may be some language-specific challenges, such as the phenomenon of polysemia and the substitution of synonyms. In this work, we explore Chinese SLU by taking advantage of large language models. Inspired by recent chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies, in this study, we propose the Spatial-CoT template to help improve LLMs’ reasoning abilities in order to deal with the challenges of Chinese SLU. Spatial-CoT offers LLMs three steps of instructions from different perspectives, namely, entity extraction, context analysis, and common knowledge analysis. We evaluate our framework on the Chinese SLU dataset SpaCE, which contains three subtasks: abnormal spatial semantics recognition, spatial role labeling, and spatial scene matching. The experimental results show that our Spatial-CoT outperforms vanilla prompt learning on ChatGPT and achieves competitive performance in comparison with traditional supervised models. Further analysis revealed that our method could address the phenomenon of polysemia and the substitution of synonyms in Chinese spatial language understanding.

Diversity of spatial activities and parents' spatial talk complexity predict preschoolers' gains in spatial skills.

Children's spatial activities and parental spatial talk were measured to examine their associations with variability in preschoolers' spatial skills (N = 113, Mage = 4 years, 4 months; 51% female; 80% White, 11% Black, and 9% other). Parents who reported more diversity in daily spatial activities and used longer spatial talk utterances during a spatial activity had children with greater gains in spatial skills from ages 4 to 5 (β = .17 and β = .40, respectively). Importantly, this study is the first to move beyond frequency counts of spatial input and investigate the links among the diversity of children's daily spatial activities, as well as the complexity of parents' spatial language across different contexts, and preschoolers' gains in spatial skills, an important predictor of later STEM success.

놀잇감과 영아의 성별에 따른 어머니의 공간 언어 사용 차이

Objectives This study examined whether block plays have an advantage in promoting infants’ exposure to spatial language, and if so, whether the advantage would vary depending on the variability in block shapes. In addition, it was investigated whether infants’ sex influences their exposure to spatial language during mother-infant play.
 Methods Forty-three 8-month-old infants and their mothers living in Seoul Metropolitan areas participated in this study. Mother-infant pairs were asked to play with a set of stuffed animal toys and then with a set of blocks. During the block play session, half of the participants were provided with colorful blocks that were identical in terms of shape; the other participants were provided with colorful blocks that varied in shapes. Spatial language that mothers used during plays was coded and classified into categories. Frequency and diversity of spatial language were calculated.
 Results Although mothers produced spatial language in both the animal toy play and the block play, their spatial language use was more frequent and more diverse when they played with blocks than with animal toys. Importantly, this advantage of block play in infants’ exposure to spatial language only appeared when the blocks varied in shapes. In addition, while mothers used the same amount of spatial language to girls and boys, they used more diverse spatial language to girls than boys.
 Conclusions These results indicate that the spatial language input that mothers provide during mother-infant plays is affected by the characteristics of the play materials and the infants. Specifically, this study suggests that blocks with a variety of shapes can promote mothers’ use of rich spatial language in the context of mother-infant play.

Linguistic Diversity and Ideology in the Linguistic Landscape of the Coffee Capital of the Philippines

This paper aims to show the extent of linguistic diversity and ideology in the multilingual advertisements or the linguistic landscape (LL) of Amadeo, a segregated town in the Southern Tagalog, Province of Cavite, Philippines. The LL, considered the country's coffee center, will be explored, considering the town's diverse language status, as well as its current economic challenges. The research will focus on 14 barangays that have been molded by 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' forces in the context of the complicated link between the languages utilized and their depiction in the chosen coffee-related LL for which Amadeo is well known. Because English is the most used foreign language in town, particularly in product advertisements, the researcher goes on to define the level of English language visibility, diversity, ideology, and position in the labeling of store signs, coffee products, and emblematic structures in Amadeo's LL. The study is investigated utilizing Sebba's framework on the unit of analysis, which covers (a) language-spatial linkages, (b) language-content relationships, and (c) language mixing as reflected in signages. Extensive documentation of LL items will be gathered and determined only based on frequency count. The frequency count results for each unit will be represented in the coding chart. The study will determine whether there is a high level of English visibility in the LL across 14 barangays in Amadeo, because the proponent believes that the English language's informative and symbolic functions in the LL serve to communicate the coffee products' essential features and details that entice educated local and foreign tourists, while also exuding modernity, sophistication, and globalness. It is also claimed that the town's business and tourism, rather than the preservation of its indigenous culture, are the primary driving forces determining Amadeo's spatial practice, symbolic construction, and language ideology as the coffee capital of the Philippines.

The importance of spatial language for early numerical development in preschool: Going beyond verbal number skills.

Recent evidence suggests that spatial language in preschool positively affects the development of verbal number skills, as indexed by aggregated performances on counting and number naming tasks. We firstly aimed to specify whether spatial language (the knowledge of locative prepositions) significantly relates to both of these measures. In addition, we assessed whether the predictive value of spatial language extends beyond verbal number skills to numerical subdomains without explicit verbal component, such as number writing, symbolic magnitude classifications, ordinal judgments and numerosity comparisons. To determine the unique contributions of spatial language to these numerical skills, we controlled in our regression analyses for intrinsic and extrinsic spatial abilities, phonological awareness as well as age, socioeconomic status and home language. With respect to verbal number skills, it appeared that spatial language uniquely predicted forward and backward counting but not number naming, which was significantly affected only by phonological awareness. Regarding numerical tasks that do not contain explicit verbal components, spatial language did not relate to number writing or numerosity comparisons. Conversely, it explained unique variance in symbolic magnitude classifications and was the only predictor of ordinal judgments. These findings thus highlight the importance of spatial language for early numerical development beyond verbal number skills and suggest that the knowledge of spatial terms is especially relevant for processing cardinal and ordinal relations between symbolic numbers. Promoting spatial language in preschool might thus be an interesting avenue for fostering the acquisition of these symbolic numerical skills prior to formal schooling.

Malleability of spatial skills: bridging developmental psychology and toy design for joyful STEAM development.

Previous research has established that advances in spatial cognition predict STEAM success, and construction toys provide ample opportunities to foster spatial cognition. Despite various construction toy designs in the market, mostly brick-shaped building blocks are used in spatial cognition research. This group of toys is known to enhance mental rotation; however, mental rotation is not the only way to comprehend the environment three-dimensionally. More specifically, mental folding and perspective taking training have not received enough attention as they can also be enhanced with the construction toys, which are framed based on the 2×2 classification of spatial skills (intrinsic-static, intrinsic-dynamic, extrinsic-static, extrinsic-dynamic). To address these gaps, we compile evidence from both developmental psychology and toy design fields to show the central role played by mental folding and perspective taking skills as well as the importance of the variety in toy designs. The review was conducted systematically by searching peer reviewed design and psychology journals and conference proceedings. We suggest that, over and above their physical properties, construction toys offer affordances to elicit spatial language, gesture, and narrative among child-caregiver dyads. These interactions are essential for the development of spatial skills in both children and their caregivers. As developmental psychology and toy design fields are two domains that can contribute to the purpose of developing construction toys to boost spatial skills, we put forward six recommendations to bridge the current gaps between these fields. Consequently, new toy designs and empirical evidence regarding malleability of different spatial skills can contribute to the informal STEAM development.

"You did a great job building that!" Links between parent-child prosocial talk and spatial language.

We investigated the extent to which parents' prosocial talk and negations relate to the quantity and diversity of parents' spatial language production. We also examined similar associations among children. Participants included 51 children of ages 4-7 years and their parents recruited from South Florida. Most of the dyads included mothers and were Hispanic and bilingual. Dyads constructed a Lego house for 10 min. Sessions were transcribed and coded for instances of parent prosocial talk (praises, reflective statements, and behavior descriptions), child general positive statements (all positive contributions to the interaction), and parent and child negations (criticisms, corrections, and disapprovals) using the Dyadic Parent-Child Interaction Coding System. Transcripts were also coded for quantity and diversity of spatial language including shape terms (e.g., square), dimensional adjectives (e.g., little), orientations (e.g., turn), locations (e.g., middle), and spatial features/properties (e.g., edge). Parents' prosocial language, but not negations, were significantly associated with the quantity and diversity of parents' spatial language. Children's general positive statements were significantly associated with children's spatial language quantity. Exploratory data analyses also revealed significant associations between parent-child talk about shapes, dimensions, and spatial features and properties. Findings suggest that variability in parent-child prosocial and spatial talk during collaborative spatial play relates to aspects of their own-and each other's-spatial language production. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Gestures cued by demonstratives in speech guide listeners' visual attention during spatial language comprehension.

Gestures help speakers and listeners during communication and thinking, particularly for visual-spatial information. Speakers tend to use gestures to complement the accompanying spoken deictic constructions, such as demonstratives, when communicating spatial information (e.g., saying "The candle is here" and gesturing to the right side to express that the candle is on the speaker's right). Visual information conveyed by gestures enhances listeners' comprehension. Whether and how listeners allocate overt visual attention to gestures in different speech contexts is mostly unknown. We asked if (a) listeners gazed at gestures more when they complement demonstratives in speech ("here") compared to when they express redundant information to speech (e.g., "right") and (b) gazing at gestures related to listeners' information uptake from those gestures. We demonstrated that listeners fixated gestures more when they expressed complementary than redundant information in the accompanying speech. Moreover, overt visual attention to gestures did not predict listeners' comprehension. These results suggest that the heightened communicative value of gestures as signaled by external cues, such as demonstratives, guides listeners' visual attention to gestures. However, overt visual attention does not seem to be necessary to extract the cued information from the multimodal message. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

How policy instruments reproduce energy vulnerability - A qualitative study of Dutch household energy efficiency measures

Rising energy prices threaten households' access to affordable energy services and increase the risk of energy vulnerability. One way to reduce the cost of access to energy is to implement energy efficiency measures at the household level (e.g. solar panels). However, not all households have the capacity to do this. Households that are unable to implement energy efficiency measures are vulnerable in two ways: 1) they may not enjoy the benefits of these measures (such as lower energy costs, healthier and more comfortable living conditions), and 2) they may face increasing costs due to fluctuating market prices for non-renewable energy sources or taxes on non-renewable energy sources. Although public authorities use different policy instruments to support citizens in implementing energy efficiency measures, it turns out that these policy instruments can (re)produce energy vulnerability in an uneven way. However, how exactly this happens remains unclear. The aim of this paper is to use the capability approach to identify mechanisms that explain how policy instruments (re)produce energy vulnerability. By combining three qualitative methods to analyse two Dutch neighbourhoods, this article illustrates how institutional arrangements affect capabilities unequally, depending on spatial scale, language skills, socio-economic characteristics and housing situation. Finally, it presents three subsequent mechanisms through which policy instruments may negatively affect citizens' capabilities and increase the risk of energy vulnerability: 1) by precluding citizens from relevant information about the energy transition; 2) by raising the thresholds for citizens to implement energy-efficient measures; and 3) by miscalculating policy consequences, i.e. citizens' poor anticipation of long-term policy implications, aggravated by legal and financial uncertainty or changing individual circumstances.

Spatial Contexts of Language Shift and Heritage Language Retention within a Highly Diverse Population: Sydney, Australia

AbstractIn immigrant countries like America, Canada and Australia, heritage language retention and language shift (to the language of the receiving society) have long been associated with classical spatial theory, of initial segregation into inner city ethnic enclaves and subsequent intra‐urban migration into majority ‘white’ or ‘mainstream’ residential suburbia, respectively. First through third generation spatial dynamics of shift and retention in Sydney are analysed for the ten largest post‐1945 labour workforce immigrant streams from Europe and the ten post‐1960s mainly skilled immigrant streams from the Middle East and Asia. Quartile and diversity analyses show that the association of intergenerational heritage language retention with spatial concentration and language shift with spatial dispersion has been superceded by a new set of spatial dynamics. Instead, patterns of retention and shift are responding to high levels of population diversity and minority majority suburbs where culturally hegemonic mainstream and minority cultural groups are intermixed across 80 per cent of Sydney's suburbs.

First Insights into Preschool Teachers’ Instructional Quality in Block Play and Its Associations with Children’s Knowledge, Interest, Academic Self-Concept and Cognitive Aspects

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Promoting children’s science knowledge by adequate measures such as guided or free play is a cardinal goal of preschool. However, there is considerable variability in preschool teachers’ instructional quality in block play, which might be associated with children’s domain-specific science skills but also their mathematic and language achievement. To examine preschool teachers’ instructional quality in a free block play episode we used a video-based assessment. We assessed children’s knowledge in block play along with mathematics, language capacity, self-concept and cognitive skills. In order to obtain first insights into the association between teachers’ practice and children’s knowledge, we took a correlational approach. The sample consisted of N = 73 preschool teachers and N = 431 children. The results revealed considerable differences between preschool teachers’ instructional quality. Overall instructional quality during block play as well as specific dimensions such as the use of spatial language, math language and cognitive activating scaffolding were positively associated with children’s stability knowledge in block play. Moreover, preschool teachers’ general language use and stimulation of communication as well as their sensitivity were positively associated with children’s self-concept in block play. Practice and policy: Our study emphasizes the importance of preschool teachers’ support for children’s knowledge and self-concept and expands prior findings on early science learning.

Treat robots as humans? Perspective choice in human-human and human-robot spatial language interaction

ABSTRACT Spatial language interaction is critical for human-robot interactions. However, previous findings are inconsistent in people’s perspective choices for robots and humans. In two experiments, participants viewed complex spatial layouts and verbally instructed an imagined human or robot addressee to find the target location or route. In both tasks, participants only tended to describe from humans‘ but not robots’ perspective, at the cost of taking more time to generate instructions for humans than robots. The results showed that spatial language interaction is not only a spatial but also a social task, and people do not regard robots as human-like social partners.

A Geography of the Screen: Mapmaking as Bridge between Film and Curatorial Production Processes

Both mapping and artist documentary filmmaking offer us subjective translations of reality and strategies to relate to and represent space, sharing analogous methods of production that allow for a useful application of the spatial language of mapmaking to filmmaking. Immersing the film process within the language of mapmaking can then act as a bridge into the spatial practices of the gallery environment, curatorial practice, and exhibition design. This process is defined here as “film-mapping” and is investigated through the development of the work For the Record by Phanuel Antwi and Rhea Storr commissioned by the transmediale festival in Berlin (2021), for which the author of the present paper is the film curator. A process for film-mapping is laid out according to three stages: (1) Compose the Territory, (2) Define the Legend, and (3) Set the Modality. Understanding the production of For the Record through this mapping terminology enriches the spatial understanding of the work, providing a translation device between filmmaking and curatorial practice and mediating between the disciplines by providing a shared language.

Spatial language in families' conversational reflections about museum experiences

Prior work demonstrates the importance of spatial language use during museum experiences for children's spatial skills. The ways families talk about experiences after they occur is also important in the learning process. Therefore, we asked how families use spatial language in conversational reflections after experiencing exhibits and programs in a children's museum. Families (N = 243) with a 6- to 11-year-old child made recordings discussing experiences in a tinkering exhibit and up to two other exhibits. Families reflected on tinkering programs that were either open-ended, function-focused, or engineering-focused. In comparison to families who reflected on open-ended tinkering programs, those who reflected on engineering-focused programs used more spatial language in their reflections. Furthermore, our analysis of reflections about additional museum exhibits revealed that families used the most spatial language when reflecting on exhibits emphasizing navigation. Results suggest design features of informal learning experiences that may support spatial language in families' reflections.