ABSTRACT
People are quite successful at finding their way around in the world by following another person's verbal directions. This is interesting and also 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. Some previous research has looked at the similarity between perceptual representations and linguistic representations of spatial relations (for example: Hayward & Tarr, 1995), but there has been little empirical examination of the structure of spatial language itself. The main linguistic element by which we talk about spatial location in the English language is the closed-class set of terms called prepositions. In the present study the psychological structure of the meaning of 25 English spatial prepositions was examined. The goal was to determine the most salient dimensions of spatial meaning, and where the various prepositions fall along these dimensions. Different groups of participants rated the similarity in meaning of pairs of prepositions under different context conditions. The first condition was a neutral or no context condition where prepositions were presented alone (for example the words "in" and "on" were presented on a computer screen). Contexts were generated by embedding the prepositions in a carrier sentence containing a figure object and a referent object.
