A model of the human capacity for categorizing spatial relations

Languages vary dramatically in their structuring of space. Despite this wide variation, however, the search for universals in spatial semantics is well motivated by the fact that all linguistic spatial systems are based on human experience of space, which is in turn constrained by the nature of the human perceptual system. I present a connectionist model which contributes to the search for universals in this domain. Its design incorporates a number of structural devices motivated by neurobiological and psychophysical evidence concerning the human visual system; these provide a universal perceptual core which constrains the process of semantic acquisition. Using these structures, the model learns the perceptually grounded semantics for closed-class spatial terms from a range of languages --- providing at least a preliminary model of the human capacity for categorizing spatial events and relations. The model gives rise to two predictions concerning the manner in which one can e...