Differences in the production and comprehension of spatial terms
People from the Netherlands tend to favor relative spatial terms (to the left) over canonical spatial terms (to the West). I will discuss experiments showing that Dutch participants consistently favor relative spatial terms despite different situations of a fictitious addressee (someone driving a car vs. someone studying a map), the scale of the described environment (town vs. country), and explicit priming of cardinal directions. Paradoxically, studies have shown that Dutch people actually have more accurate spatial memories from texts with canonical than relative spatial terms. This suggests that people can immediately recode non-preferred spatial terms in a preferred equivalent one and that this recoding results in spatial memories that are very effective. Results from transferring this idea to an applied setting (describing census data to the blind) will be discussed.