Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The semantics of spatial terms has attracted substantialattention in the cognitive sciences, revealing both compellingsimilarities and striking differences across languages.However, much of the evidence regarding cross-linguisticvariation pertains to fine-grained comparisons betweenindividual lexical items, while cross-linguistic similarities arefound in more coarse-grained studies of the conceptual spaceunderlying semantic systems. We seek to bridge this gap,moving beyond the semantics of individual terms to ask whatthe comparison of spatial semantic systems may reveal aboutthe conceptualization of locations in English and MandarinChinese and about the nature of potential universals in thisdomain. We subjected descriptions of 116 spatial scenes tomultidimensional scaling analyses in order to reveal thestructures of the underlying conceptual spaces in eachlanguage. In addition to revealing overlaps and divergences inthe conceptualization of space in English and Mandarin, ourresults suggest a difference in complexity, whereby Mandarinterms are accommodated by a lower-dimensional similarityspace than are English terms.