Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people understand the pragmatics of spatial language?We propose a rational-speech act model for spatial reasoning,and apply it to the terms ‘in’ and ‘near’. We examine people’sfine-grain spatial reasoning in this domain by having them lo-cate where an event occurred, given an utterance. Our prag-matic listener model provides a quantitative and qualitative fitto people’s inferences.