How to construct a linguistic landmark: language cues in the formation of hierarchical representations of space

The formation of a hierarchical representation of space can be induced by the spatial adjacency of places marked by landmark objects from the same semantic category, as was demonstrated by a route-planning experiment (Wiener and Mallot in Spat Cogn Comput 3(4):331-358, 2003). Using the same paradigm, we tested the efficiency of linguistic cues with various hierarchical categorization principles in regional structuring. In five different conditions, places of the experimental environment were characterized (1) by landmark objects, (2) by arbitrary proper names on region level, (3) by prototypical names on region level, (4) by nouns from different semantic categories, and (5) by groups of nouns with intrinsic whole-part relation. A region effect comparable to the landmark object condition was found only for the whole-part relations, which combine spatial proximity with a shared context. A linguistic analysis revealed a correspondence to the intended regional subdivision only for the cues of this condition.