Spatial language is widely used, both literally to describe space and figuratively to express a
broad range of ideas. This article reviews two projects studying the nature of mental …

In order to describe a spatial environment, people must take a perspective on it. Previous
researchers had claimed that in describing space, speakers take listeners on mental tours …

In four experiments, subjects read route or survey descriptions of naturalistic environments
and then answered verbatim or inference questions from both perspectives and drew maps …

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews that spatial descriptions spontaneously construct
spatial mental models of the described scenes as a natural consequence of reading for …

Spatial descriptions symbolically represent environmental information through language
and are written in two primary perspectives: survey, analogous to viewing a map, and route …

Four experiments explored readers' mental models of described scenes. Environments were
described from one of two perspectives, an internal perspective of an observer within the …

Mental models of text are representations of what the text is about (ie, situations), rather than
representations of the text itself. Many mental model theories propose that mental models …

How do people describe the location of a target object to another? This task requires a
reference object or frame and terms of reference. Traditional linguistic analyses have loosely …

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on two experiments testing the efficacy of
language to evoke spatial transformations. The results support the claim that people's …

Subjects read narratives describing directions of objects around a standing or reclining
observer, who was periodically reoriented. RTs were measured to identify which object was …