Language, Culture and Spatial Cognition: Bringing anthropology to the table

Roß, Norbert; Shenton, Jeffrey T.; Hertzog, Werner; Kohut, Mike

doi:10.4148/1944-3676.1100

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 24 publications

(25 reference statements)

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“…There is evidence, however, suggesting there are no such effects. Ross et al (2015) compared Spanish-speakers to Tzotzil Maya-speakers living in the same environment on a number of tasks assessing spatial cognition. They found no differences, despite distinct linguistic differences in describing space.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distance from a Cultural Prototype and Psychological Distress in Urban Brazil: A Model

2023

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The metaphor of culture as a space or environment of meaning is widely employed. Going beyond metaphor, we present a model of culture as a 3-dimensional Euclidean space, using data from Brazil on cultural models of life goals. The dimensions of this space are defined by degree of sharing of culture (cultural competence); alternate configurations of that shared meaning (residual agreement); and social practice (cultural consonance). A cultural distance metric calculated within those dimensions identifies an individuals’ proximity to prototypical goals; greater distance from these goals is associated with higher psychological distress. Cultural distance is in turn influenced by one’s sense of personal agency. Finally, in a set of open-ended interviews, the more individuals employ spatial metaphors in talking about culturally defined life goals, the higher their sense of personal agency and cultural consonance. This model moves the discussion of culture as a space of meaning from metaphor to measurement.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distance from a Cultural Prototype and Psychological Distress in Urban Brazil: A Model

2023

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Spatial Cognition, Modality and Language Emergence: Cognitive Representation of Space in Yucatec Maya Sign Language (Mexico)

Le Guen,

Tuz Baas

2024

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This paper analyzes spatial gestures and cognition in a new, or so-called “emerging”, visual language, the Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YSML). This sign language was created by deaf and hearing signers in various Yucatec Maya villages on the Yucatec Peninsula (Mexico). Although the sign language is not a signed version of spoken Yucatec Maya, both languages evolve in a similar cultural setting. Studies have shown that cultures around the world seem to rely on one preferred spatial Frame of Reference (FoR), shaping in many ways how people orient themselves and think about the world around them. Prior research indicated that Yucatec Maya speakers rely on the use of the geocentric FoR. However, contrary to other cultures, it is mainly observable through the production of gestures and not speech only. In the case of space, gestures in spoken Yucatec Maya exhibit linguistic features, having the status of a lexicon. Our research question is the following: if the preferred spatial FoR among the Yucatec Mayas is based on co-expressivity and spatial linguistic content visually transmitted via multimodal interactions, will deaf signers of an emerging language created in the same cultural setting share the same cognitive preference? In order to answer this question, we conducted three experimental tasks in three different villages where YMSL is in use: a non-verbal rotation task, a Director-Matcher task and a localization task. Results indicate that YMSL signers share the same preference for the geocentric FoR.

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Language, Culture and Spatial Cognition: Bringing anthropology to the table

Cited by 2 publications

References 24 publications

Distance from a Cultural Prototype and Psychological Distress in Urban Brazil: A Model

Distance from a Cultural Prototype and Psychological Distress in Urban Brazil: A Model

Spatial Cognition, Modality and Language Emergence: Cognitive Representation of Space in Yucatec Maya Sign Language (Mexico)

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