The Effect of an Extra Object on the Linguistic Apprehension of the Spatial Relationship between Two Objects

A sentence describing a spatial relationship includes at least two objects: a located object and a reference object. The presence of an extra object in a scene that is recognized as neither a located nor a reference object, reduces the acceptability of spatial terms related to the spatial relationship between reference and located objects under given conditions (Carlson & Logan, 2001). However, it is still unclear how the overall acceptability distribution of a spatial term changes in a scene when an extra object is present in various locations. In this study, we examined this point, using the paired comparison method with Thurstone's law of judgment (Case V). The results showed that an extra object had both relative increase and reduction effects on the overall acceptability distribution of a spatial term. This suggests that our linguistic apprehension of the spatial relationship is biased intricately by the presence of extra objects.