Languages describe spatial relations in different manners. It is however hypothesized that highly frequent ways of categorizing spatial relations across languages correspond to the natural ways humans conceptualize them. In this study, we explore the use of machine translation to gather data in semantic typology to address whether different languages show similarities in how they carve up space. We collected spatial descriptions in English, translated them using machine translation, and subsequently extracted spatial terms automatically. Our results suggest that most spatial descriptions are accurately translated. Despite limitations in our extraction of spatial terms, we obtain meaningful patterns of spatial relation categorization across languages. We discuss translation limits for semantic typology and possible future directions.

In humans, simple 2D visual displays of launching events (“Michottean launches”) can evoke the impression of causality. Direct launching events are regarded as causal, but similar events where a spatial and/or temporal gap is added between the movements of the two objects, as non-causal. In the present study, we investigated the evolutionary origins of this phenomenon and tested whether Guinea baboons (Papio papio) perceive causality in launching events. We used a discrimination and categorisation task of Michottean launches. Our results indicate that Guinea baboons discriminate between different events, but we did not find a learning advantage for a categorisation based on causality. This implies that they focused on the spatial and temporal gap to achieve accurate categorisation, but not on causality per se. Currently we cannot rule out that Guinea baboons have causal representations of Michottean events, but our findings point to a feature-based discrimination strategy in a sorting task.

Languages tend to describe who is doing what to whom by placing subjects before objects. This bias for agents is reflected in event cognition: agents capture more attention than patients in human adults and infants. We investigated whether this agent preference is unique to humans. We presented Guinea baboons (Papio papio, N = 13) with a change detection paradigm with chasing animations. The baboons had to respond to a colour change which was applied to either the chaser/agent or the chasee/patient. They were faster to detect a change to the chaser than to the chasee, which cannot be explained by low-level features in our stimuli. Our study suggests that baboons show an agent preference similar to human infants and adults. This may be an evolutionarily old mechanism that is shared between humans and other primates, which could have become externalised in language as a tendency to place the subject first.