Tutorial: Understanding spatial thought through language use

Dr. Thora Tenbrink, University of Bremen, Germany

Full day tutorial at COSIT Conference on Spatial Information Theory
Belfast, Maine, USA, September 12-16th 2011

    Aims

Many researchers use language in some way or other to understand thought processes, for example by asking participants questions about how they performed a task or by eliciting descriptions or think aloud protocols. Such information can be inspiring for the interpretation of other kinds of data collected in cognitive science research. However, in order to exploit the information provided by linguistic data more thoroughly and on a deeper level, a systematic approach is required.
The aim of this tutorial is to familiarize young and experienced researchers with the analysis of language produced in relation to spatial thought processes. The method of Cognitive Discourse Analysis (CODA) (Tenbrink & Gralla, 2009; Tenbrink, 2010) will be introduced, which serves as a coherent framework for empirical methods at the interface of linguistics and spatial cognition. See the detailed description below.

  
   Topics and scope

-         Psycholinguistic perspective: Analysing language production data in relation to mental representations

-         Verbal protocol & content analysis perspective: Analysing language production data in relation to complex thought processes

-         Cognitive linguistics perspective: Patterns in language structure

-         Discourse analytic perspective: Patterns in language use

-         CODA: Combining perspectives – understanding spatial thought through language use

-         Practical examples: Using CODA to interpret sample data from ongoing research

 
    Target audience

The audience should be familiar with basic research questions in spatial cognition, and at best come with concrete application scenarios where unconstrained language is used to address such questions. Sample data collected in relevant scenarios will be discussed, tailored to the participants' current focus of interest.

Linguistic knowledge or expertise is welcome but not a prerequisite for this tutorial.

Since linguistic analysis is here proposed as a tool to support other methods across various subfields in cognitive science, participants may be interested in this approach at any point in their career, ranging from graduate students to established experts in spatial cognition.

Dr. Thora Tenbrink

  Detailed description

Methods that employ language to address research questions in cognitive science range from psychological via psycholinguistic approaches to linguistic discourse analysis. In spite of their fundamental diversity, such methods share the basic view that patterns in language are systematically related to patterns of thought (Chafe, 1998). A prominent feature of the CODA framework, and a specific focus of the tutorial, is to identify relevant types of linguistic patterns that are likely to point to specific cognitive processes in diverse spatial settings.

On the one hand, CODA can be used to address the concept­ualiza­tion of perceived situations and events. Taking psycholinguistic study methods as a starting point (e.g., Carlson, 1999; Coventry & Garrod, 2004), the experimental designs used in CODA typically allow for free language usage when confronted with perceptual stimuli. Quantitative (statistically reliable) results, which are often restricted in scope, combine with qualitative (descriptive) findings concerning patterns in spontaneous linguistic choices that relate to specific features of the situation context (e.g., Tenbrink, Andonova, & Coventry, in press) as well as the underlying cognitive prerequisites (cf. Taylor & Tversky, 1996; Nuyts & Pederson, 1997) and communicative aspects (Schober, 1993). On the other hand, CODA can be used to enhance the analysis of think-aloud protocols and retrospective reports for the identification of (internal) cognitive processes (Ericsson and Simon, 1993; Tenbrink, 2008). Conventionally, the focus in this kind of analysis lies on the content of verbal data, addressing those aspects (e.g., particular thought processes or strategies) that the speakers are themselves aware of. The content-based inspection of verbal reports, particularly if carried out by experts in the problem domain and set against a substantial theoretical background (Krippendorff, 2004), often leads to well-founded specific hypotheses about the cognitive processes involved. The detailed systematic analysis of linguistic features and structures in CODA provides a particularly sound basis for using the language data as evidence (e.g., Tenbrink & Seifert, 2011; Tenbrink & Wiener, 2009).

Across application areas, the aim in CODA is to gain insights into generalizable cognitive phenomena that go beyond conscious reflection by individual speakers, and that may not necessarily be directly observable in linguistic content. Speakers may not be aware of the cognitive structures that are reflected in particular ways of framing a representation linguistically. Furthermore, they may not be consciously aware of the underlying network of options (Tenbrink & Freksa, 2009) that allows for a range of linguistic choices beside their own, which emerges more clearly by considering a larger data set collected under controlled circumstances. According to previous research in cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis (e.g., van Dijk, 2008), linguistic features such as the verbal representation of semantic domains reflected in ideational networks, lexical omissions and elaboration, presuppositions, hesitation and discourse markers, and the like all indicate certain conceptual circumstances; these are related to the current cognitive represen­tations in ways that distinguish them from other options available in the network. Besides building on established insights about the significance of particular linguistic choices, validating evidence for the relationship between patterns of language use and the associated cognitive processes can be gained by triangulation, i.e., the combination of linguistic analysis with other types of evidence such as behavioral performance data.

    References

Carlson, Laura A. 1999. Selecting a reference frame. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 1 (4), 365-379.

Chafe, Wallace. 1998. Language and the Flow of Thought. In Michael Tomasello (ed.), The New Psychology of Language. Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, pp. 93-111. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Coventry, K. R. and Garrod, S. C. 2004. Saying, Seeing and Acting: The Psychological Semantics of Spatial Prepositions. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.

van Dijk, Teun A. 2008. Discourse and Context. A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ericsson, K. Anders and Herbert A. Simon. 1993. Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data.  Cambridge, MA: Bradford books/MIT Press.

Krippendorff, Klaus. 2004. Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Nuyts, Jan and Eric Pederson (eds.). 1997. Language and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schober, Michael F. 1993. Spatial perspective-taking in conversation. Cognition 47: 1-24.

Taylor, Holly A. and Barbara Tversky. 1996. Perspective in spatial descriptions. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 371-391.

Tenbrink, Thora. 2008. The verbalization of cognitive processes: Thinking-aloud data and retrospective reports. In Wiebke Ramm & Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (eds.), Linearisation and Segmentation in Discourse. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse 2008 (MAD 08), Feb 20-23 2008, Lysebu, Oslo. Oslo: Dept. of Literature, Area Studies and Europ. Languages, Univ. of Oslo, pp. 125-135.

Tenbrink, Thora. 2010. CODA: Kognitive Diskursanalyse. In: Esther Ruigendijk, Thomas Stolz, und Jürgen Trabant (Hrsg.), Linguistik im Nordwesten: Beiträge zum 1. Nordwestdeutschen Linguistischen Kolloquium. Bochum: Brockmeyer, S. 117-133.

Tenbrink, Thora, Elena Andonova, and Kenny R. Coventry (in press). Spatial strategies in the description of complex configurations. Discourse Processes.

Tenbrink, Thora and Christian Freksa. 2009. Contrast sets in spatial and temporal language. ICSC International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Rome 2009. Cognitive Processing 10 Supplement 2, S322-S324.

Tenbrink, Thora and Linn Gralla. 2009. Accessing complex cognitive processes via linguistic protocol analysis. In Ute Schmid, Marco Ragni, Markus Knauff (Eds.): Proceedings of the KI 2009 Workshop Complex Cognition, Paderborn, Germany, September 15, 2009. Bamberger Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsinformatik und Angewandten Informatik Nr. 82, Bamberg University, October 2009, pp. 1-12.

Tenbrink, Thora and Inessa Seifert. 2011. Conceptual Layers and Strategies in Tour Planning. Cognitive Processing 12:1, 109–125.

Tenbrink, Thora and Jan Wiener. 2009. The verbalization of multiple strategies in a variant of the traveling salesperson problem. Cognitive Processing 10:2, 143-161.