Chapitre 12. Approches cognitives de la spatialisation du langage

The page, whether on screen or on paper, constitutes a well circumscribed space constructed and regulated by a set of processing instructions (the so-called spatio-linguistic text structures) inscribed in the text in the form of lexical-syntactic phrases, typographic marks and dispositional devices. It is thus a specific, spatially artefactualized modality of language, and as such, it is a particularly appropriate object for the study of spatial cognition. Our main objectives have been a) to throw light on the lexical-syntactic component of text and its visual realisation on the page (linguistic modelling), b) to construct computer-based tools for the extraction of information and the control of text images (computational formalisation), c) to study the impact of the visual structure of text on comprehension and recall in children and adults, and the specfic role of visual properties on reading strategies (psycholinguistic experimentation). The corpus analysis has led to the construction of descriptive models for the text objects under study : enumerations (and some aspects of titles). A particular model of text structures has been referred to a common background for the three approaches : the Model of Text Architecture (rooted in the notion of speech acts and a view of text layout as a trace of textual metalanguage), linked with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (which do not take into account visual aspects). As a result, number of the aspects and the relations of the structure of enumerations have been evidenced, including : the syntactic nature of the introductory expression, the syntactic and rhetorical constraints between items and layout features signalling these items