Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Decades of research have revealed that spatial language is the result of a complex interplay between language-independent, conceptual factors and language-specific forces (e.g., Bowerman, 1996; Johnston & Slobin, 1979; Landau & Jackendoff, 1993; Levinson & Meira 2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006). However, currently, a growing body of research acknowledges the importance of a further, much less explored but highly important factor having to do with pragmatic pressures – the general communicative need to convey informative meanings with appropriate levels of required effort (Grice, 1975; Zipf, 1949). This symposium aims to present research documenting the effect of communicative/pragmatic pressures on how spatial language systems are organized, used by speakers of different languages and acquired during development. The contributed papers explore a variety of spatial language phenomena, across many different languages, using a variety of empirical methods and diverse populations of participants.