Using sentences to convey spatial information

Individuals listened to pairwise relationships (e.g., AB, BC, CD) and learned the underlying spatial ordering (e.g., ABCD). Previous work shows that the order in which information is presented strongly affects the success of learning and that these presentation order effects are different when the information occurs in sentences (e.g., "The B is to the left of the C") instead of pairs (e.g., "B-C"). By using a number of different presentation orders and both kinds of input, the present work reveals that these sentence-pair differences can be attributed to the presence of a stated relationship (e.g., the adjective "left") in the sentence and the corresponding facilitation of basic processes by linguistic structures. The role of language in the learning of spatial relationships is discussed.