F.: Cognitive Representations of Projective Prepositions

This paper describes a psycholinguistic experiment that investigates the cognitive representations of the projective preposi-tions in front of and behind. In par-ticular: (1) what is the constituency of the spatial template (i.e., the prototyp-ical regions of acceptability) associated with these prepositions; (2) what effect does frame of reference ambiguity have a these regions; (3) do these preposi-tions exhibit a bias towards a particular frame of reference. Our results indicate that: (1) the spatial templates associated with these prepositions correlate with pro-jective spatial templates for above, be-low, left and right,reported in (Logan and Sadler, 1996); (2) when frame of refer-ence ambiguity occurs these spatial tem-plate are modified in a similar manner to that reported in (Carlson-Radvansky and Logan, 1997) for the preposition above; (3) in contrast with the results of pre-vious work (Carlson-Radvansky and Ir-win, 1993; Carlson-Radvansky and Lo-gan, 1997) which indicate a preference towards the absolute and viewer-centred frames of reference for the preposition above, the prepositions in front of and be-hind exhibit a bias towards the landmark’s intrinsic frame of reference.