Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Accounts of spatial language aim to address both the meaningof a spatial term and its usage patterns across diverse cases,but do not always clearly distinguish these from one another.Focusing on the case of English prepositions in and on, we setout to disentangle spatial language meaning from spatiallanguage use by comparing judgments on a series of linguistictasks designed to tap each aspect of spatial language. Wedemonstrate that judgments of truth-conditional meaning andpatterns of naturalistic use show different distributionalsignatures, with judgments of meaning giving rise to a moreuniform distribution than use patterns. We explore a thirdaspect of spatial language: lexical choice, and propose thatchoice is a key factor in shaping the distribution of spatialexpression use. Our analyses reveal that the distribution oflexical choice judgments is highly correlated with thedistribution of expression use in spatial descriptions for thesame spatial scenes, supporting a model of spatial languagethat differs from traditional accounts of meaning andcategorization.