Spatial Perspective in Spoken Descriptions of Real World Environments at Different

This study analyzed the linguistic features found in spoken descriptions of two spatial layouts; participants ’ homes and the continent of Europe. Specifically, we were interested in whether these environments would be described from different perspectives by the same individuals. We hypothesized that the lexical features and discourse structure of the descriptions would reflect the perspective from which these two environments are most commonly learned—an embedded perspective in the home and an external perspective in the Europe descriptions. The results supported these hypotheses, suggesting that the choice of perspective in linguistic descriptions seems to be affected by the mode of acquisition and environmental features, rather than by a speaker’s general preference for one perspective over another