ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the various ways in which the reader's knowledge and beliefs influence the interpretation of written text. The text serves to evoke the spatial relationships in an orderly fashion because we have represented the relationships as knowledge in a form that permits inferences to be made. Knowledge can be thought of as a representation of features of the world we experience. Since this is experienced in spatial terms, it follows that we have ways of representing spatial information. Our mental representations preserve, necessarily, the several spatial dimensions of the physical world. All languages are replete with terms for capturing spatial relationships. The knowledge follows naturally from a mental model of the situation that preserves the necessary organization of the two people and the ladder in space. One useful way of considering our knowledge of events in time is as mental 'scripts' – a term introduced by Roger Schank and his fellow workers.
