Building on earlier neuropsychological work, we adopted a
novel individual differences approach to examine the
relationship between spatial language and a wide range of
both verbal and nonverbal abilities. Three new measures were
developed for the assessment of spatial language processing:
spatial naming, spatial verbal memory, and verbal
comprehension in spatial perspective taking. Results from a
sample of young adults revealed significant correlations
between performance on the spatial language tasks and
performance on both the analogous (non-spatial) verbal
measures as well as on the (non-verbal) visual-spatial
measures. Visual-spatial abilities, however, were more
predictive of spatial language processing than verbal abilities.
Furthermore, results from a sample of older adults revealed
impairments in visual-spatial tasks and on spatial verbal
memory. The results support dual process accounts of
meaning, and provide further evidence of the close connection
between the language of space and non-linguistic visualspatial
cognition.