4 - Space in Tongan cognition

Summary

Thinking about space

In the previous chapter I presented and discussed ways in which spatial relationships are expressed in the Tongan language. Clearly some other ways have been left out from my investigation, such as the small set of Tongan dimensional adjectives and the open class of Tongan verbs expressing either state or motion. Nonetheless, some salient characteristics of the language have been highlighted and their relevance to the project at hand is soon to become apparent. In the present chapter I investigate the preferred mental representations of space that generate Tongan behaviors, including language use.

Linguistic preferences may not replicate preferences in representing mentally spatial relationships. This may be more true or possible when other cognitive capacities such as long-term memory or making inferences are involved. It is for this reason that I administered a battery of tasks, named ‘psychological tasks,’ where individuals would provide only non-linguistic responses. The rationale being that by avoiding linguistic responses, the results would allow direct access to cognitive activities without the filtering role of language. A subset of the psychological tasks includes three activities aimed at detecting specific preferences in the use of frames of reference (FoR) for representing spatial relationships in long-term memory in small-scale space (a second subset will be discussed in Chapter 5).