In what ways are language cognition and perception interrelated? Do they influence each other?
This book casts a fresh light on these questions by putting individual speakers' cognitive
contexts i.e. their usage-preferences and entrenched patterns of linguistic knowledge into
the focus of investigation. It presents findings from original experimental research on spatial
language use which indicate that these individual-specific factors indeed play a central role
in determining whether or not differences in the current and or habitual linguistic behaviour
of speakers of German and English are systematically correlated with differences in
non-linguistic behaviour (visual attention allocation to and memory for spatial referent
scenes). These findings form the basis of a new speaker-focused usage-based model of
linguistic relativity which defines language-perception cognition effects as a phenomenon
which primarily occurs within individual speakers rather than between speakers or speech
communities.
