ABSTRACT
Space is of utmost importance in our lives and all languages provide an inventory of linguistic means to represent spatial information. Given its universal importance, space is an ideal domain in which to explore the following questions regarding the relationship between language and thought: Are the linguistic and the conceptual systems entirely independent? Does our conceptualization of the world determine the structure of linguistic systems? Or, conversely, does language partially determine our cognitive organization? And from the point of view of language acquisition does cognition drive language acquisition or is cognition mainly shaped by the language to be acquired?
