Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Along with using geometric information to define spatial terms such as “in”, Coventry and Garrod (2004) have proposed the use of dynamic-kinematic (DK) routines which relate to how two objects interact (kinematic) over time (dynamic). For the spatial description, “The penny is in the bowl,” the penny is contained by a bounding box around the bowl as well as the DK location-control routine that if the bowl moves, so will the penny. In two experiments a speeded prime/ probe picturesentence verification task was used to gather evidence for the existence of DK routines. The first experiment found evidence for priming location-control for the preposition “in”. The second experiment examined location-control routines for both “in” and “on” using the same prepositions for both location-control and embedded spatial relationships. A significant response time benefit for priming location-control routines was found. These experiments provided evidence for priming location-control routines independent of semantic priming.