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A wealth of evidence indicates that children use their developing linguistic knowledge to incrementally interpret speech and predict upcoming reference to objects. For verbs, determiners, case-markers, and adjectives, hearing linguistic information that sufficiently constrains referent choice leads to anticipatory eye-movements. There is, however, limited evidence about whether children also use spatial prepositions predictively. This is surprising and theoretically important: spatial prepositions provide abstract semantic information that must interface with spatial properties of, and relations between, objects in the world. Making this connection may develop late because of the complex mapping required. In a visual-world eye-tracking task, we find that adults and 4-year-olds hearing 'inside' (but not 'near') look predictively to objects that afford the property of containment. We conclude that children make predictions about the geometric properties of objects from spatial terms that specify these properties, suggesting real-time use of language to guide analysis of objects in the visual world.

Symmetry, a fundamental concept in perception and language, poses an interpretative challenge due to the disparity between its formal definition and linguistic expression. Formal symmetry is often distorted when expressed linguistically, such that e.g., 'North Korea is similar to Red China' is interpreted differently from 'Red China is similar to North Korea' despite their logical equivalence (Tversky, 1977). Gleitman et al. (1996) found this interpretive asymmetry stems from the syntactic positions of arguments, such that symmetry is restored when both arguments are on equal syntactic footing (e.g., a Conjoined NP Intransitive, “North Korea and China are similar”). Here a novel eye-tracking method tested how syntax and lexical semantics contribute to symmetrical interpretations. Participants were asked to rapidly sort spoken utterances by clicking on visible folders marked with a symmetrical or asymmetrical icon. Commitments to symmetry based on syntactic evidence emerged rapidly as the sentence unfolded over time.

Decades of research have revealed that spatial language is the result of a complex interplay between language-independent, conceptual factors and language-specific forces (e.g., Bowerman, 1996; Johnston & Slobin, 1979; Landau & Jackendoff, 1993; Levinson & Meira 2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006). However, currently, a growing body of research acknowledges the importance of a further, much less explored but highly important factor having to do with pragmatic pressures – the general communicative need to convey informative meanings with appropriate levels of required effort (Grice, 1975; Zipf, 1949). This symposium aims to present research documenting the effect of communicative/pragmatic pressures on how spatial language systems are organized, used by speakers of different languages and acquired during development. The contributed papers explore a variety of spatial language phenomena, across many different languages, using a variety of empirical methods and diverse populations of participants.

Motion quality can differentiate experts from novices in fields like surgery (Ershad et al., 2018). We extend approaches used by researchers in that field to examine the relationship between motion and skill in a children’s block-building task. We ask whether the relationship between these two variables is detected equally well by humans and machines—in this case, motion sensors embedded in the blocks. We investigate whether adults’ judgments about motion quality and children’s overall building skill reflect children’s actual construction ability, and whether data from embedded motion sensors predict children’s skill as well as adult judgments do. We find that human raters outperform the motion sensor data. Our findings raise questions about how people form such intuitive judgments of expertise, and how automated judgments of skill can be enhanced to more accurately predict expertise in block building and other similar cognitive tasks.

Individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) display an unusual cognitive profile with severe deficits in spatial skills along with fluent and arguably complex language. Our experiment focused on the comprehension of scalar expressions, such as `some', `two', and `or' as a window to study their semantic and pragmatic competence. We compared performance of individuals with WS (mean age = 16,4 (year, month), age range = 11,10-21,11) to children matched by Mental Age (MA, (mean age = 6,1, age range = 5,2-7,8) and typical adults. No differences between the WS and MA groups were found in their knowledge of truth conditions of scalar terms. We further tested whether participants accept the statements with scalar terms in contexts featuring their logical (semantic) readings. Individuals with WS accepted logical readings more often than children matched by MA, suggesting that individuals with WS have access to the abstract meaning of scalar expressions.

Block-building is an early-developing spatial skill in which multiple spatial actions unfold over time. The processes underlying block-building have eluded our understanding, but existing data show that children’s and adults’ construction paths are highly systematic and selective. In this paper, we investigate whether manipulating the stability of block models to be built affects the character of construction paths. We asked participants to build models with either strong or weak support. We measured the step-by-step actions taken and used eye-tracking to assess differences between adults and children in how they collect and use visual information while building. We find that children and adults are highly selective in their construction paths, but models with weak support are more difficult to build, reflected in the specifics of their paths and the eye movements made during building. These results suggest that the stability of a structure drives information-gathering and building strategies in block construction.

Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature, in logic and mathematics, and in perception, language, and thought. Although humans are exquisitely sensitive to visual symmetry (e.g., of a butterfly), linguistic symmetry goes far beyond visuospatial properties: Many words refer to abstract, logically symmetrical concepts (e.g., equal, marry). This raises a question: Do representations of symmetry correspond across language and vision, and if so, how? To address this question, we used a cross-modal matching paradigm. On each trial, adult participants observed a visual stimulus (either symmetrical or non-symmetrical) and had to choose between a symmetrical and non-symmetrical English predicate unrelated to the stimulus (e.g., "negotiate" vs. "propose"). In a first study with visual events (symmetrical collision or asymmetrical launch), participants reliably chose the predicate matching the event's symmetry. A second study showed that this "matching" generalized to static objects, and was weakened when the stimuli's binary-relational nature was made less apparent (i.e., one object with a symmetrical contour, rather than two symmetrically configured objects). Taken together, our findings support the existence of an abstract relational concept of symmetry which humans access via both perceptual and linguistic means. More broadly, this work sheds light on the rich, structured nature of the language-cognition interface, and points towards a possible avenue for acquisition of word-to-world mappings for the seemingly inaccessible logical symmetry of linguistic terms.

Spatial construction--the activity of creating novel spatial arrangements or copying existing ones--is a hallmark of human spatial cognition. Spatial construction abilities predict math and other academic outcomes and are regularly used in IQ testing, but we know little about the cognitive processes that underlie them. In part, this lack of understanding is due to both the complex nature of construction tasks and the tendency to limit measurement to the overall accuracy of the end goal. Using an automated recording and coding system, we examined in detail adults' performance on a block copying task, specifying their step-by-step actions, culminating in all steps in the full construction of the build-path. The results revealed the consistent use of a structured plan that unfolded in an organized way, layer by layer (bottom to top). We also observed that complete layers served as "convergence points," where the most agreement among participants occurred, whereas the specific steps taken to achieve each of those layers diverged, or varied, both across and even within individuals. This pattern of convergence and divergence suggests that the layers themselves were serving as the common subgoals across both inter and intraindividual builds of the same model, reflecting cognitive "chunking." This structured use of layers as subgoals was functionally related to better performance among builders. Our findings offer a foundation for further exploration that may yield insights into the development and training of block-construction as well as other complex cognitive-motor skills. In addition, this work offers proof-of-concept for systematic investigation into a wide range of complex action-based cognitive tasks.

Young children can reason about direct and indirect visual information, but fully mapping this understanding to linguisticforms encoding the two knowledge sources appears to come later in development. In English, perception verbs with smallclause complements (I saw something happen) report direct perception of an event, while perception verbs with sententialcomplements (I saw that something happened) can report inferences about an event. In two experiments, we explore when4-9-year-old English-speaking children have linked the conceptual distinction between direct perception and inferenceto different complements expressing this distinction. We find that unlike older children or adults, 4-6-year-olds do notrecognize that see with a sentential complement can report visually-based inference, even when syntactic and contextualcues make inference interpretations highly salient. Until around age seven, children are still learning the syntax andsemantics of perception verbs like see and how distinct syntactic forms encode different kinds of perceptual experience.

The neural representation of visual-spatial functions has traditionally been ascribed to the right hemisphere, but little is known about these representations in children, including whether and how lateralization of function changes over the course of development. Some studies suggest bilateral activation early in life that develops toward right-lateralization in adulthood, while others find evidence of right-hemispheric dominance in both children and adults. We used a complex visual-spatial construction task to examine the nature of lateralization and its developmental time course in children ages 5-11 years. Participants were shown two puzzle pieces and were asked whether the pieces could fit together to make a square; responses required either mental translation of the pieces (Translation condition) or both mental translation and rotation of the pieces (Rotation condition). Both conditions were compared to a matched Luminance control condition that was similar in terms of visual content and difficulty but required no spatial analysis. Group and single-subject analyses revealed that the Rotation and Translation conditions elicited strongly bilateral activation in the same parietal and occipital locations as have been previously found for adults. These findings show that visual-spatial construction consistently elicits robust bilateral activation from age 5 through adulthood. This challenges the idea that spatial functions are all right-lateralized, either during early development or in adulthood. More generally, these findings provide insights into the developmental course of lateralization across different spatial skills and how this may be influenced by the computational requirements of the particular functions involved.

Verbs are widely analyzed as functions taking a discretenumber of arguments (e.g., drink has two arguments but givehas three). Recent studies, however, suggest that English verbsencode Instruments as more or less salient (e.g., the Instrumentis more salient for slice, less salient for eat). We conducted ajudgment task with adult speakers of Spanish and Mandarinand found that verbs in these languages also encodeInstruments as having a relative degree of salience, inconsistentwith the discrete model of participant encoding.

Support (one object preventing another from falling) is linguistically encoded by adults and children in a highly structured and differentiated way, with basic locative expressions or Light verbs (e.g., in English, the block is "on/put" on the box) encoding Support-from-Below, and lexical verbs (e.g., she "stuck" the block on the box) encoding Mechanical Support. We ask whether parents use such highly differentiated language when describing support configurations to their young children and whether the age of the child moderates this effect. We found that when parents of children 6-months to 3.5 years of age described events of Support-from-Below and Mechanical Support to their children, they did use distinct linguistic expressions, encoding Support-from-Below with Light verbs (e.g., "put on") and Mechanical Support with other lexical verbs (e.g., "stick on/to"). This differentiation was especially prominent for parents of the oldest children, who used more lexical verbs ("stick"), and fewer Light verbs ("put"), to encode Mechanical Support. These findings are the first to demonstrate that parents' spatial language to their young children distinguishes between two distinct types of support and suggest that parent input may play an important role in helping children learn to linguistically carve up the semantic domain of support. This sets the stage for future research to test the causal connection between the two.

Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising the question of whether perception verbs could serve as a semantic model for the acquisition of mental verbs via their shared syntax. Since embedded clauses are key to referencing mental states for both verb classes, we examine the developmental trajectory of perception vs. mental verbs in these constructions and others. Using a sample of 5,884 child-produced utterances and 8,313 parent-produced utterances from the Brown and Gleason corpora of CHILDES, we analyze children's production of perception and mental verbs in their syntactic frames, as well as that of their parents. We find that children begin to produce embedded frames for both perception and mental verbs around the same time, but produce embedded frames with mental verbs more often, especially as they get older, despite greater use of perception verbs overall. These patterns do not reflect parental input: parents produce both verb types with similar frequency and use embedded frames more often than their children. These findings suggest that perception verbs are unlikely to serve as a model for mental verbs, and instead that mental verbs and their regular occurrence with embedded frames may provide a model for perception verbs when the latter reference mental states. We propose a semantic updating account for children's acquisition of perception verbs, arguing that children's early knowledge of perception verbs may not include mental state representations as a component of their meaning, and that this may only develop later as children learn the propositional syntax that is shared by and regularly occurs with mental verbs.

Configurations of support include those that exhibit Support-From-Below (cup "on" table), as well as those involving Mechanical Support (e.g., stamp "on" envelope, coat "on" hook). Mature language users show a "division of labor" in the encoding of support, frequently using basic locative expressions (BE "on" in English) to encode Support-From-Below but lexical verbs (e.g., "stick, hang") to encode cases of Mechanical Support. This suggests that Support-From-Below configurations may best represent the core for the category of support, and could be privileged in supporting early mappings to spatial language. We tested this hypothesis by examining spontaneous productions of children younger than 4 years found in the CHILDES corpora. Children used "on" to encode Support-From-Below more than other types of support configurations. They also showed clear distinctions in how they mapped different verbs (e.g., BE vs. lexical verbs) to Support-From-Below configurations compared to other support configurations. Analysis of parent language suggests that these observed patterns in children's language cannot be fully explained by input, although a role for input is likely for children's encoding of Mechanical Support. Thus, a concept of Support-From-Below may serve as a core representation of support, and hence the privileged spatial representation onto which spatial language for support is mapped.

Block construction tasks are highly complex, yet even youngchildren engage in these tasks in both informal and formallearning settings. In this paper, we ask whether the specificpaths through which children build a structure are unique to theindividual, or alternatively, constrained by similar principlesacross individuals and over age. Our results show that althoughchildren between 4 and 8 make frequent errors in copyingmodel constructions, there is a striking amount of consistencyin specific attributes of their paths of construction, and thisconsistency mirrors that of adults. The build paths suggest thatalthough children sometimes build inefficiently, they tend tobuild layer-by-layer, consistent with a role for intuitive physicsthat enables the creation of stable structures.

Spatial construction—creating or copying spatialarrangements—is a hallmark of human spatial cognition.Spatial construction appears early in development, predictslater spatial and mathematical skills, and is used throughoutlife. Despite its importance, we know little about the cognitiveprocesses underlying skilled construction. Construction tasksare highly complex but analyses have tended to focus onbroad-stroke measures of end-goal accuracy. In this paper weintroduce a novel behavioral coding formalism to characterizean individual’s entire construction process, examine manyindividuals’ processes in aggregate, and summarize patternsthat emerge. The results show high consistency at certainpoints occurring throughout the construction, but also indicateflexibility in the interim paths that lead to and diverge fromthese points. Our approach offers a new method that can moreprecisely describe the behavioral patterns observed duringconstruction in order to reveal the underlying cognitiveprocesses engaged, and capture individual differences inbuilding expertise.

Speakers involved in a communicative exchange construct aninternal model of their addressees and draw upon the model tocraft utterances that are likely to be understood. In many real-world situations (e.g., when talking to a non-expert, non-nativespeaker, or a child), this process of audience design involvesidentifying gaps in the lexical-semantic knowledge of thelistener and selecting alternative expressions. We examinespeaker adaptation to a listener with incomplete lexicalknowledge in the spatial domain, specifically a failure tocomprehend the basic terms left/right. Experimental andmodeling results provide evidence of rapid adaptation that ismodulated by the availability of alternative spatial terms. Weconsider how our approach relates to recent work incomputational pragmatics, and suggest that adaptation to thelexical knowledge of the addressee is an important butrelatively understudied topic for future research.

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.

The spatial prepositions in and on apply to a wide range ofcontainment and support relations, making exhaustivedefinitions difficult. Theories differ in whether they endorsegeometric or functional properties and how these properties arerelated to meaning and use. This study directly examines theroles of geometric and functional information in adults’ andchildren’s use of in and on by developing a large sample ofrelations situated within a small gradable geometric andfunctional feature space. We propose that variation in featuresacross items is systematically related to the use of in and onand demonstrate that feature-language relationships changeacross development: adults’ expression use is sensitive to bothgeometric and functional features, while children’s use variesonly according to geometric features.

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic developmental disorder characterized by severe spatial impairments andstructural and functional abnormalities in the hippocampus (Meyer-Lindenburg et al., 2006). Although the spatial deficit iswell-documented, we know little about other deficits that would be predicted by the hippocampal abnormalities. Here, weexamine episodic memory (i.e. memory for personally experienced events in a spatio-temporal context, Tulving, 1983), askingpeople with WS to recount past personal events. We use an interview method developed for patients (Levine et al., 2002) andtypically developing children (Willoughby et al., 2012). People with WS recounted significantly fewer episodic details thanage-matched controls. Importantly however, they offered just as many semantic details (reflecting general world knowledge),indicating that global factors (e.g., verbal skill or IQ) cannot account for these results. Our work identifies a specific cognitivedeficit in WS and further highlights the critical involvement of the hippocampus in episodic memory.

Languages of the world universally encode spatialrelationships between objects. However, speakers employ avariety of different language-specific expressions, which mayencode culture-specific information about objects and/ordifferent spatial concepts. We ask whether aspects of theencoding of spatial relations across languages neverthelessshow common underlying spatial concepts as reflected in thedistributions of spatial expressions over spatial sub-types. Weexamine a set of hypothesized distinctions within the spatialrelational concepts of Containment and Support across threetypologically distinct languages: English, Hindi, andMandarin. We find support for two related hypothesesconcerning common patterns of variation in (a) speakers' useof select "basic" spatial expressions, and (b) languages'inventory and distribution of expressions across hypothesizedContainment and Support subtypes. The results underscorethe presence of strong universal similarities in both theextension of basic spatial expressions across relations and inthe principles governing the diversity of expressions availablefor encoding particular relations

Linguistic encoding of spatial events has long provided a forum for examining how languages encode space, how children learn their native encodings, and whether cross-linguistic differences affect non-linguistic representations of space. One prominent case concerns motion events in which objects are moved into tight or loose-fit relationships of containment or support. Seminal findings from Bowerman showed that young children learning Korean regularly use specific verbs to encode tight/loose fit across containment and support relationships, whereas children learning English use prepositions to encode containment or support (e.g. in/on) across the tight/loose fit distinction. Others have asked how these early-acquired differences affect non-linguistic encoding of similar events. Many of these studies have focused on the lexical differences between the two languages – verbs (in Korean) and/or prepositions (in English). Here, we ask whether this focus might underestimate how English encodes these events by closely examining the range of options used by English speakers to encode loose and tight-fit motion events. In Experiment 1, 3-year-old and adult English speakers described joining and separating events which culminated in loose or tight-fit end-states. Participants' use of lexical verbs together with their syntactic frames differentiated among the event types, especially between "loose-fit" events with asymmetric motion between objects (e.g. a block being put into a bowl) vs. "tight-fit" events with symmetric motion (e.g. two Legos being brought together at the same time). In Experiment 2, we replicated the basic findings using events portrayed with more complex of objects. Our findings show that English affords both children and adults rich resources to encode motion events culminating in tight and loose fit end-states; these devices include both lexical items and syntactic frames. The findings raise important questions about how to examine effects of language on non-linguistic spatial cognition in children and adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Containment and support have traditionally been assumed to represent universal conceptual foundations for spatial terms. This assumption can be challenged, however: English "in" and "on" are applied across a surprisingly broad range of exemplars, and comparable terms in other languages show significant variation in their application. We propose that the broad domains of both containment and support have internal structure that reflects different subtypes, that this structure is reflected in basic spatial term usage across languages, and that it constrains children's spatial term learning. Using a newly developed battery, we asked how adults and 4-year-old children speaking English or Greek distribute basic spatial terms across subtypes of containment and support. We found that containment showed similar distributions of basic terms across subtypes among all groups while support showed such similarity only among adults, with striking differences between children learning English versus Greek. We conclude that the two domains differ considerably in the learning problems they present, and that learning in and on is remarkably complex. Together, our results point to the need for a more nuanced view of spatial term learning.

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's (1993) paper, "What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition," proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds (named by count nouns), versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions (i.e., play the role of arguments of spatial prepositions). We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the "what" and "where" systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as "in" and "on," whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as "above"/"below" and "right"/"left," whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects' force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms' uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations.

Language is a collaborative act: To communicate successfully, speakers must generate utterances that are not only semantically valid but also sensitive to the knowledge state of the listener. Such sensitivity could reflect the use of an "embedded listener model," where speakers choose utterances on the basis of an internal model of the listener's conceptual and linguistic knowledge. In this study, we ask whether parents' spatial descriptions incorporate an embedded listener model that reflects their children's understanding of spatial relations and spatial terms. Adults described the positions of targets in spatial arrays to their children or to the adult experimenter. Arrays were designed so that targets could not be identified unless spatial relationships within the array were encoded and described. Parents of 3-4-year-old children encoded relationships in ways that were well-matched to their children's level of spatial language. These encodings differed from those of the same relationships in speech to the adult experimenter (Experiment 1). In contrast, parents of individuals with severe spatial impairments (Williams syndrome) did not show clear evidence of sensitivity to their children's level of spatial language (Experiment 2). The results provide evidence for an embedded listener model in the domain of spatial language and indicate conditions under which the ability to model listener knowledge may be more challenging.