Cross-Linguistic Differences in Side Assignment to Objects and Interpretation of Spatial Relations: Right and Left in German and Italian

Abstract

Which position do you mean by “to the right of” an object? Starting within a few months after birth, humans use deixis like “to the right of” in different ways in everyday situations—nonverbal deixis such as pointing gestures, and later verbal ones, too, in the form of adverbs, prepositions, and pronouns. It has been shown that deixis can be used in a language-specific manner (e.g., Levinson 2003). Building on previous work revealing cross-linguistic differences, our studies investigate the use of secondary local deixis by German and Italian native speakers. The two languages belong to different language families and differ regarding the semantics of secondary local deixis (e.g., Stoltmann 2014). Two experiments were carried out. The first experiment consisted of a survey that investigated side assignment for an intrinsic object. The second experiment used mouse-tracking to investigate the decision-making process for secondary local deixis in different situational contexts, one with an artificial agent and one without. Results of the survey indicate that Germans and Italians assign the right and left side to intrinsic objects in significantly different ways. Results of the mouse-tracking experiment reveal significant differences between German and Italian participants in interpreting spatial relations, with the intrinsic reference object supplemented by an artificial agent. These situations were embedded by indirect speech. In this experiment, speakers of German and Italian engaged in significantly different cognitive processing. These findings may be crucial for different applications, such as instruction manuals and their automatic translation, as well as robotic devices in artificial intelligence.