[The process of constructing mental models from spatial descriptions]

This study examined the effect of word order in constructing mental models from spatial descriptions. In Experiment 1, 24 graduate and undergraduate students read three sentences in length of spatial descriptions and verified location diagrams. Experimental factors were word order and propositional combinations. In single sentence processing, reading times (RTs) of Subject-Location-Verb (SLV) word order condition were longer than RTs of Location-Subject-Verb (LSV) condition. In the integration process, the effect of propositional combinations (reflected in RTs of the second sentence) were found only in the LSV condition. To clarify the integration process, the word order of the second sentence was changed in Experiment 2. Compared with the result of Experiment 1 (with both the first and the second sentence SLV). RTs of the second SLV sentence (with the first LSV) were reduced. These results support the hypothesis that the integration process is carried out by on-line processing, and that subjects use not only proportional representations of text, which contain logical relations of terms, but also surface structure information such as word order in constructing mental models.