TY - GEN
T1 - Boundaries and prototypes in categorizing direction
AU - Mast, Vivien
AU - Wolter, Diedrich
AU - Klippel, Alexander
AU - Wallgrün, Jan Oliver
AU - Tenbrink, Thora
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Projective terms such as left, right, front, back are conceptually interesting due to their flexibility of contextual usage and their central relevance to human spatial cognition. Their default acceptability areas are well known, with prototypical axes representing their most central usage and decreasing acceptability away from the axes. Previous research has shown these axes to be boundaries in certain non-linguistic tasks, indicating an inverse relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic direction concepts under specific circumstances. Given this striking mismatch, our study asks how such inverse non-linguistic concepts are represented in language, as well as how people describe their categorization. Our findings highlight two distinct grouping strategies reminiscent of theories of human categorization: prototype based or boundary based. These lead to different linguistic as well as non-linguistic patterns.
AB - Projective terms such as left, right, front, back are conceptually interesting due to their flexibility of contextual usage and their central relevance to human spatial cognition. Their default acceptability areas are well known, with prototypical axes representing their most central usage and decreasing acceptability away from the axes. Previous research has shown these axes to be boundaries in certain non-linguistic tasks, indicating an inverse relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic direction concepts under specific circumstances. Given this striking mismatch, our study asks how such inverse non-linguistic concepts are represented in language, as well as how people describe their categorization. Our findings highlight two distinct grouping strategies reminiscent of theories of human categorization: prototype based or boundary based. These lead to different linguistic as well as non-linguistic patterns.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84907084440&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-11215-2_7
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-11215-2_7
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84907084440
SN - 9783319112145
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 92
EP - 107
BT - Spatial Cognition IX - International Conference, Spatial Cognition 2014, Proceedings
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - International Conference on Spatial Cognition IX, Spatial Cognition 2014
Y2 - 15 September 2014 through 19 September 2014
ER -