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Reference frames in language and cognition: cross-population mismatches

Abstract Numerous studies have found evidence of a speech community’s referential practices in discourse being predictive of its members’ behavior in nonverbal tasks. In this article, we discuss a series of exceptions to this alignment pattern, drawing on data from eleven populations of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and Central America, and Oceania. These exceptions have not been discussed in conjunction with one another and the striking commonalities across the findings of these studies have gone unnoticed: (a) in discourses referring to small-scale space, either intrinsic frame use is dominant or both relative and geocentric frames are used frequently in addition to intrinsic frames; and (b) in recall/recognition memory, geocentric coding is more common than egocentric coding (in tasks that involve stationary stimulus configurations) in nine of the populations, while in the remaining two, there is evidence of extensive intrinsic coding even in nonverbal cognition. We discuss these findings in light of Haun’s innate geocentrism hypothesis (Haun, D. B. M., C. Rapold, J. Call, G. Janzen & S. C. Levinson. 2006. Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in hominid spatial cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(46). 17568–17573). Our data offers partial support for this hypothesis, but simultaneously calls into question whether any extrinsic reference frames are available innately.