Recruitment, Selection and Alignment of Spatial Language Strategies

All languages of the world have a way to talk about space and spatial relations of objects. Cross-culturally, immense variation in how people conceptualize space for language has been attested. Different spatial conceptualization strategies such as proximal, projective and absolute have been identi-fied to underlie peoples conception of spatial reality. This paper argues that spatial conceptualization strategies are ne-gotiated in a cultural process of linguistic selection. Concep-tualization strategies originate in the cognitive capabilities of agents. The ecological conditions and the structure of the environment influence the conceptualization strategy agents invent and which corresponding system of lexicon and ontol-ogy of spatial relations is selected for. The validity of these claims is explored using populations of humanoid robots