The experiment compares Balinese participants, who tend toward geocentric spatial thinking, with Dutch participants, who use more relative spatial frames. Both groups find workable solutions for marking relationships between people and actions, but they favor different resources. Balinese gesture-makers lean on the body’s shape and movement in consistent ways, while Dutch participants explore multiple spatial strategies. The results suggest cultural habits can steer whether space itself becomes a grammatical slot or whether the body carries the burden of meaning.
This work matters because it connects everyday cognition to the long-term paths languages take, and it has implications for how we think about inclusion in communication design and education. If cultural spatial habits change how grammar can emerge, then tools that assume one universal mapping of space onto meaning may miss important alternatives. The paper invites you to explore how deeply cultural thinking can shape language and what that means for expanding our understanding of human potential.
Abstract
The emergence of linguistic structure is shaped by interaction and cultural transmission as well as cognitive biases and social conventions. An important aspect of linguistic structure is reference distinction or “who did what to whom.” This paper explores how cross-cultural differences in the conceptualization of space may influence the development of strategies for referent distinction in this domain. We conducted a silent gesture experiment employing dyadic interaction and iterated learning with participants from two cultural groups that differ in their predominant conceptualization of space: Balinese and Dutch. Focusing on silent gestures produced by hearing participants naïve to sign languages, we examined the effect of culturally embedded biases on the use of space and body, the resources of manual communication. Our findings reveal the emergence of various strategies that are equally successful but differ in their use of space and body. While the Dutch participants developed multiple different strategy types, the Balinese largely followed one strategy type. Crucially, they did not employ an abstract or grammaticalized conception of space. We argue that, rather than reflecting a developmental shift, this pattern stems from the geocentric conceptualization predominant in Balinese culture that inhibits grammatical use of space and favors alternative strategies, such as capitalizing on the iconic affordances of the body to represent grammatical relationships. Our findings thus provide evidence for how cultural conventions such as the conceptualization of space can influence the evolution of linguistic structure.
