Journal article
Reference frames in language and cognition: cross-population mismatches
J Bohnemeyer, E Danziger, J Lum, A Alshehri, E Benedicto, J Blythe, L Cerqueglini, K Donelson, A Eggleston, A Gaby, YT Lin, R Moore, T Nikitina, H Stoakes, M Yulbarangyang Balna
Linguistics Vanguard | WALTER DE GRUYTER GMBH | Published : 2022
Abstract
Numerous studies have found evidence of a speech community’s referential practices in discourse being predictive of its members’ behavior in nonverbal tasks. In this article, we discuss a series of exceptions to this alignment pattern, drawing on data from eleven populations of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and Central America, and Oceania. These exceptions have not been discussed in conjunction with one another and the striking commonalities across the findings of these studies have gone unnoticed: (a) in discourses referring to small-scale space, either intrinsic frame use is dominant or both relative and geocentric frames are used frequently in addition to intrinsic frames; and (b)..
View full abstractGrants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
Our research was supported by the following grants: Australian Research Council grants DE130100399 "The acquisition of kinship terminology in a morphologically complex Australian Language" (PI J. Blythe) and DP120102701 "Thinking and talking about atolls: The role of the environment in shaping language and our understanding of physical space" (PIs B. Palmer and A. Gaby); Israel Science Foundation grant #680/17 "Spatial language across generations in Negev Arabic" (PIs L. Cerqueglini and R. Henkin); Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan grant MOST 110-2811-H-002-543; National Science Foundation grants BSC-0723694 "Spatial language and cognition in Mesoamerica", BSC-1053123 "Spatial language and cognition beyond Mesoamerica", BSC-1551925 "Doctoral dissertation research: Spatial language and cognition in bilingual minds" (PI J. Bohnemeyer). Data collection on Mopan and Yucatec was additionally supported by the Max Planck Society.