ABSTRACT
Language learning does not take place in a bubble. Exposure to language co-occurs with other (non-linguistic) input, such as exploration of the visual world, in interaction with a caregiver who plays an active role in the manipulation of joint attention and joint action (Tomasello, 2003; see also Velay and Longcamp, this volume). The consequences of this for language learning are that the child is likely to acquire a number of associative links during learning. First, the child learns that words co-occur with other words – that is, that the symbols in a language co-occur with other symbols in systematic ways. It has been shown that such relations can be powerful predictors of understanding under a range of circumstances (see, for example, Landauer and Dumais, 1997). Second, the child learns that words co-occur with non-linguistic information. That is, words become associated with perceptual information, such that hamster is associated with a certain shape, a furry feeling and so on. Taken together, it seems likely that word-to-word (symbol-to-symbol) relations and word to percept (what I will call in shorthand, symbol-to-visuosymbol relations) might provide a more powerful means of accounting for understanding than either set of relations alone (see Andrews et al., 2009, for modelling and discussion). However, there is a third set of learned relations. The child learns that certain types of perceptual information occur together (see also Bullens et al., this volume; Miller and Carlson, this volume). For example, bottles and glasses are frequently found together, are often associated with a pouring event, and such a pouring event affords relieving oneself from a state of thirst. It can be argued that these three sets of interconnected relations are necessary to account for meaning/understanding and, as I show below, these interconnections are important for an understanding of how spatial language is comprehended across different situations and tasks. My goal here is not to elaborate on how these interconnections are learned, nor to discuss how they constitute understanding (see Coventry and Taylor, in preparation), but rather to show how these sets of relations are important for understanding two types of spatial language: spatial prepositions and spatial demonstratives.
