More than a jump to the left
Despite the fact that physical space follows similar laws everywhere across the globe, cultures vary as to how space is encoded in their language. Some, for example, do not use egocentric terms such as 'left, right, front, back' to talk about spatial relations, instead using allocentric notions like 'north, south, east, west' at all times for all scales: 'The spoon is north of the bowl' or 'There is an snake by your Northern leg.' Whether not only spatial language but also spatial cognition varies across cultures remains a contested question. In a new study, which will be published in next week's issue of Current Biology, Daniel Haun and Christian Rapold present a comparative analysis of how children from different cultures articulate spatial relations in different ways: Germans, whose language preferentially codes space in 'right, left, front, back' terms, and the Akhoe Hai om, a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer group from Northern Namibia,...