Doctoral Dissertation Research: A spatial grammar

Orienting oneself in physical space is a basic function of human language. All people use language to orient objects, give directions, and identify features in the physical world around them. Some languages place an emphasis on using landscape features such as the sea, land, and elevation to orient speakers, while others prefer to use features oriented in relation to the speaker’s body such as “left” and “right.” The choice of whether to use one strategy or another has been shown to have observable effects on human cognition and is one of the few aspects of the mind-language connection that can be directly quantified in research.

For example, the way space is encoded in a language can affect how a visual scene is committed to memory. This doctoral dissertation project advances a scientific understanding of the nature of this mind-language connection through linguistic documentation of spatial orientation systems. Other benefits to society include workforce development and educational opportunities for research assistants who receive training in aspects of language sciences research.

This doctoral dissertation project collects video and audio recordings of speakers, using targeted elicitation tools, to examine the use of spatial vocabulary. These recordings are analyzed with modern digital tools to gain insights into how these speakers use spatial language and how their choice of spatial language compares to other languages. Recordings are made in collaboration with the language community and are transcribed, translated, and annotated for relevant spatial language.

All materials are deposited into an archival repository. The resulting publicly accessible digital corpus is used by the broader public as well as researchers in a variety of scientific disciplines.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.