Language, cognition, and space : the state of the art and new directions

Spatial perception and cognition is fundamental to human abilities to navigate through space, identify and locate objects, and track entities in motion.

Moreover, research findings in the last couple of decades reveal that many of the mechanisms humans employ to achieve this are largely innate, providing abilities to store 'cognitive maps' for locating themselves and others, locations, directions and routes.

In this, humans are like many other species. However, unlike other species, humans can employ language in order to represent space.

The human linguistic ability combined with the human ability for spatial representation apparently results in rich, creative and sometimes surprising extensions of representations for three-dimensional physical space.

The present volumes bring together over 20 articles from leading scholars who investigate the relationship between spatial cognition and spatial language.

The volumes are fully representative of the state of the art in terms of language and space research, and point to new directions in terms of findings, theory, and practice.