Understanding How We Think about Space

Abstract

People are quite successful at finding their way around in the world by following another person’s verbal directions. This is somewhat surprising given that a verbal description of a space is limited in the information it provides compared to the information provided by the direct perceptual experience of moving around in an environment. An important linguistic element by which we talk about spatial location in the English language is the closed-class set of terms called prepositions. There has been little experimental work on large numbers of spatial terms such as prepositions. In the present study the meaning of 25 English spatial prepositions was examined using multi-dimensional scaling techniques. The goal was to determine the most salient dimensions of spatial meaning, and where the most common English prepositions fall along these dimensions. English-speaking adults rated the similarity in meaning of pairs of prepositions across different contexts. One was a neutral (or no context) condition. Additionally, several contexts were generated by embedding the prepositions in carrier sentences containing different figure objects, ground objects and verbs. Four spatial dimensions emerged: verticality, containment, distance and one less easily interpreted dimension. The dimension of verticality was strongly evident in all contexts, and not much influenced by differences in context. The dimensions of containment and distance also emerged consistently across different sentence contexts, but order of individual words within these dimensions changed across different contexts. The results indicate that the most important dimensions that provide a framework for organising the meaning of English spatial prepositions are: verticality and containment. A dimension of distance also plays an important role. Context sometimes modifies the spatial meaning of certain prepositions. For example, the meaning of the word “through” implies containment in “The bird flies through the trees,” but not in “The bird is through the trees.” These results also demonstrate how multidimensional scales (MDS) can be used to study the meanings of a set of terms.