线状物体空间关系的自然语言理解的双语比较

Bi-Linguistic Study of Natural-language Understanding of Spatial Relations in Chinese and English

人们用语言描述空间关系时所选用的词汇反映了他们对于物体空间状态的认识。语言如何表达空间关系与很多因素有关,除了空间实体的特征和它们之间的空间关系,描述者个人的特征也影响到描述的语言,例如描述者的语言和文化上的差异,以及性别、年龄和受教育程度等。本文将通过认知实验,比较不同语言、文化背景的人对线状物体空间关系描述的理解。主要对比了两组人群:母语为英语的人群和母语为汉语的人群。共进行了3组实验:母语为英语的人群对英语描述的线状物体空间关系的理解;母语为汉语的人群对英语描述的线状物体空间关系的理解;以及母语为汉语的人群对汉语描述的线状物体空间关系的理解。采用相同的题目,比较了3组实验的结果。结果表明语言文化在一定程度上影响了人们对空间关系描述的理解。

The problem existing in current GISs is that they all use quantitative methods to store and retrieve spatial information.However,people usually use qualitative terms to describe spatial relations.Current GIS models are limited in their capacities of representation of spatial information about geographic space.If we want to 'translate' natural languages about spatial information to formal languages which computers can understand,we must know how natural languages construct and understand spatial relations.The description of a spatial relation is the reflection of human's cognition of spatial objects.It is not only affected by the topology and metric,but also affected by the individual characteristics of describers.To disclose the effects of culture and language on people's perceiving and understanding of spatial relations,this paper first compared the syntactic expressions of spatial relations in English and in Chinese,then three human-subject tests about spatial relations between two linear geographic objects were conducted in two groups of people who are native speakers of Chinese and English: native English speakers were tested on English expressions;native Chinese speakers were tested on Chinese expressions;and native Chinese speakers tested on English expressions.The results of the tests were analyzed to find whether different groups of people have different understanding on the natural-language description of spatial relations between two linear objects.It was found that in some cases two groups of people have completely different opinions about the descriptions of spatial relations.Native English speakers have more extreme opinions of 'strongly agree' and 'strongly disagree' for every spatial relation determination,while native Chinese speakers have more moderate opinions.It indicated that cultures and languages might have effects on spatial cognitions.But when the same group of people were tested with different languages,the results showed there is no much difference,which indicated that when they read a description of spatial relation in English,Chinese speakers translated it to corresponding Chinese words and actually understood the meanings of those Chinese words,although the meaning of these two expressions are slightly different.It also suggested the corresponding words that we use to translate between two languages are actually not exactly the same.The experiments help us in discovering how people in different cultures and languages perceive and express spatial relations,so that we can build an intelligent GIS based on common sense of geography.