Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cross-linguistically, the semantic extensions of certain adpositions obey an implicational scale, ranging from thesituation class of prototypical ON (support from below) to prototypical IN (full containment) (Bowerman & Pederson 1992,Levinson & Meira 2003, Feist 2008). However, the nature of this phenomenon remains unresolved. Two general accounts arepossible: 1) the patterned output is the simply the result of diachronic factors and speakers learn which extensions go with eachadposition without any particular analysis, or 2) there may be some online psychological reality to the scale.Language learning may be a fruitful domain to test this second account. Using an artificial language learning paradigm,subjects are trained on alternative forms paired with scenes representing some situation classes on the scale. In testing, theygeneralize the use of these forms to novel classes. Preliminary findings suggest a generalization of forms to uses in waysconsistent with a psychological representation.