Spatial language helps us to encode relations between objects and organize our thinking. Little is known about the neural instantiations of spatial language. Using voxel-lesion symptom mapping (VLSM), we tested the hypothesis that focal brain injured patients who had damage to left frontal-parietal peri-Sylvian regions would have difficulty in naming spatial relations between objects. We also i...

What factors influence people’s use of spatial prepositions? In this paper, we examine the influence of four factors – geometry of the Ground, function of the Ground, animacy of the Ground, and animacy of the Figure – on the use of English in and on. We find evidence for all four of these factors. We conclude that spatial prepositions appear to involve a complex set of spatial and non-spatial i...

In this paper we present an experimental study on native speakers’ access to lexical relations among spatial relations. Our main focus is a still poorly understood domain: the lexical relations that hold between (pairs of) directional spatial prepositions (from, to) and locative prepositions (at). Two broad families of proposals exist in the literature. One family suggests that the members of t...

Empirical studies suggest that (a) language is grounded in action and (b) that the immediate past history of use influences how humans produce and comprehend spatial prepositions. We put these assumptions to the test by computationally modelling data from a spatial language task. The task required participants to place functionally related/unrelated objects on a screen w.r.t to a spatial prepos...

Covariance functions and variograms play a fundamental role in exploratory analysis and statistical modelling of spatial and spatio-temporal datasets. In this paper, we construct a new class of spatial covariance functions using the Fourier transform of some higher-order kernels. Moreover, we extend this class of spatial covariance functions to the spatio-temporal setting using the idea used in...

the rapid change of land use and land cover in the metropolitan area of tehran has influenced the distribution pattern of land surface temperature (lst). in this study, a spatial autocorrelation analysis is adopted to process the spatial-temporal changes of lst and normalized difference vegetation index (ndvi) in tehran during the period of 1987 to 2010. global spatial autocorrelation analysis ...

In this study, the use of most frequent spatial prepositions in English, Polish, Swedish, and Russian is analyzed. The prepositions and their contexts are extracted from corpora by means of concordance tools. The collostructional strength between the prepositions and the most frequent nouns in the PPs (Gries et al. 2005) is then computed in order to get a more detailed picture of the contexts i...

This paper investigates the connection between temporal logic and the semantics of some temporal expressions in English. Specii-cally, we show how the meanings of English temporal preposition-phrases can be expressed as modal operators in an interval-based temporal logic which we call ETL0. We show how cascaded temporal preposition phrases and temporal preposition phrases with complex complemen...

The goal of this paper is to offer a novel account on the Syntax and Semantics of Spanish Spatial Prepositions. This account is novel in at least three aspects. First, the account offers a unified syntactic analysis that covers understudied types of Spanish Spatial Prepositions (e.g. en el centro de, junto y a la izquierda de). Second, the account shows that such treatment can be extended to mo...

Spatial and temporal Measure Phrases (MPs) such as ten meters, five years etc. appear with various linguistic items, including locative prepositions, scalar dimensional adjectives and comparatives, and show certain systematic contrasts in these domains. Some examples are given below. (1) a. Prepositions: ten meters behind/outside/*near/*on the house b. Adjectives: ten meters wide/*narrow/deep/*...