Abstract
Empirical findings of cross-linguistic studies reveal three different frames of spatial reference: intrinsic, relative, and absolute. Of special interest are relative and absolute systems because they have antagonistic logical implications concerning the dependence on standpoint and orientation of the speaker/hearer. On the background of these findings it becomes crucial to show how an agent can form such language-specific spatial representations. In this paper, the system Locator is introduced as a model of concept formation in the spatial domain. It is assumed that an agent creates necessary discriminative features in processes of self-organization and selection and cannot just discover or “find” them in its environment. A number of simulations show that agents successfully create concepts of either a relative system (German) or an absolute system (Marquesan), relying solely on multimodal input (visual and linguistic).
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Notes
Locator is based on the simulation system Lokutor which was developed by Jan Torsten Milde at Bielefeld University (Milde 2000).
If a language noticeably prefers and dominantly uses one of these three systems in a certain domain of spatial reference, speakers of this language will use an equal—congruent or isomorphic—coding system to memorize spatial configurations or draw conclusions from them while solving non-linguistic problems. [Author’s translation]
The notion “pixel” is somewhat misleading for a 3D representation. As described above, each “pixel” is a 4D vector.
In this kind of simulation the prerequisite of working with autonomous agents is given up because some interesting inside information can be gained from this kind of experiment.
In the following, two different fonts are used for relations and concepts.
Apart from the concepts, which can be seen as a history of experiences and thus realize some kind of memory.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the framework of the graduate program Task-Oriented Communication (GK256). The dissertation thesis is online (in German): http://archiv.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/disshabi/2001/0076/. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which improved the paper.
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Rehm, M. Being seaward-handed: a computational model of the acquisition of language-specific spatial references. Cogn Process 5, 15–30 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-003-0007-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-003-0007-6