Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We experimentally investigate, by means of a novel gesture-elicitation paradigm, the spontaneous spatial frames ofreference (FoRs) used by bilingual individuals who speakJapanese (which has been labeled as a “relative” language)and one of the endangered Ryukyuan languages (Miyako orShiraho) whose speakers have been reported to routinely useabsolute FoRs. How would these last elderly bilingualspeakers spontaneously resolve the clashing FoRs the twolanguages they speak bring forth? We find that despite thefact that Japanese and these Ryukyuan languages have fullcorresponding grammatical and lexical resources forexpressing both, relative and absolute FoR, Ryukyuanspeakers tend to markedly prefer the latter gesturally.Methodologically, the results, which are consistent with dataobtained with standard FoRs methods, corroborate thereliability of the novel gesture elicitation task, which adds tothe battery of techniques for studying FoRs a method thatassesses effortless spontaneous real-time cognition with highecologically validity.