Human spatial cognition and learning can be greatly influenced by the symbol systems we use to represent and communicate about space. In particular, spatial language—by far the most ubiquitous of all our external representational systems—can enhance spatial cognition in several ways. Spatial language encodes space in categorical terms and emphasizes qualitative divisions of space rather than metric properties. Spatial language thus can invite qualitative categories that guide spatial reasoning. Spatial language provides tools for labeling spatial relations and focuses attention on patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. Moreover, spatial language can form an abstract system that permits analogical extensions of spatial representations to other domains.
The goals of our research on Spatial Language are:
- To explore the effects of spatial language on spatial cognition.
- To delineate the cognitive constraints on spatial language.
- To understand how spatial language is learned.
- To explore the neural representation of spatial language and thought.
Point of Contact:
Publications from SILC
- ♦ Brunyé, T., Rapp, D.N. & Taylor, H.A. (2008). Representational flexibility and specificity following spatial descriptions of real world environments. Cognition, 108, 418-443.
- ♦ Christie, S. & Gentner, D. (in press). Where hypotheses come from: Learning new relations by structural alignment. Journal of Cognition and Development.
- ♦ Cifuentes Férez, P. & Gentner, D. (2006). Naming motion events in Spanish and English. Cognitive Linguistics, 17, 443-452.
- ♦ Feist, M.I., & Gentner, D. (2007). Spatial language influences memory for spatial scenes. Memory and Cognition, 35, 283-296.
- ♦ Gentner, D., & Christie, S. (in press). Language and cognition in development. To appear in M. M. Spivey, K. McRae, & M. Joanisse (Eds.) The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics.
- ♦ Gentner, D. & Christie, S. (in press) No symbols, no dice. To appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
- ♦ Gentner, D. & Christie, S. (2008). Relational language supports relational cognition in humans and apes: A response to Penn, Holyoak & Povinelli. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 137-183. [Penn, Holyoak, Povinelli paper: doi: 10.1017/S0140525X08003543 ]
- ♦ Gentner, D. (2007). Spatial cognition in apes and humans. TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 11, 192-194.
- ♦ Gentner, D. (in press). Bootstrapping children’s learning: Analogical processes and symbol systems. To appear in Cognitive Science.
- ♦ Gentner, D., Anggoro, F. K. & Klibanoff, R. S. (in press). Structure-mapping and relational language support children's learning of relational categories. Child Development.
- ♦ Gentner, D., & Bowerman, M. (2009). Why some spatial semantic categories are harder to learn than others: The typological prevalence hypothesis. In J. Guo, E. Lieven, S. Ervin-Tripp, N. Budwig, S. Özçaliskan, & K. Nakamura (Eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin. NJ, New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- ♦ Gentner, D. & Christie, S. (2006). Using numbers to structure space. In R. Sun & N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 267-272).
- ♦ Gentner, D., Loewenstein, J., & Hung, B. (2007). Comparison facilitates children's learning of names for parts. Journal of Cognition and Development, 8(3), 285-307.
- ♦ Gentner, D., Simms, N. & Flusberg, S. (2009). Relational language helps children reason analogically. In N.A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society.
- ♦ Göksun, T., Hirsh-Pasek, K, Golinkoff, R. M., Imai, M., Konishi, H., & Okada, H. (2011). Who is crossing where?: Infants discrimination of figures and grounds in events. Cogniton, 121, 176-195.
- ♦ Göksun, T., Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (2009). Processing figures and grounds in dynamic and static events. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord & G. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Boston University 