Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Across languages, people differ in which of the three basicframes of reference (FoRs) they prefer when describingspatial relations: absolute, intrinsic, or relative. But how muchvariation is there with regard to the relative FoR, which isanchored in the observer and occurs as one of three variants?Is the reflection variant canonical, as assumed by manyscholars? And how are objects in a person’s back referred to:by turning towards the objects? Results from two studies, onewith speakers of Norwegian and Farsi, the other with speakersof German and Japanese, reveal that reflection is notcanonical, but that translation and even rotation are used aswell. In addition, turning towards objects arranged in aperson’s back is very rare; what people use instead is abackward projection strategy that goes without rotation.