Reviewed by Engin Arik, Purdue University

The use of spatial language in dialogues is one of the research areas that will contribute to our knowledge of the language of space. This book does so wonderfully by providing thirteen papers on psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, and computer science in spatial language in dialogic contexts.

Kenny R. Coventry, Thora Tenbrink, and John Bateman, in Ch. 1 ‘Spatial language and dialogue: Navigating the domain’ (1–7), outline the book and give motivations for studies on the language of space in dialogues. In Ch. 2, ‘Why dialogue methods are important for investigating spatial language’ (8–22), Matthew E. Watson, Martin J. Pickering, and Holly P. Branigan stress the importance of studying spatial language in dialogue and show that interlocutors affect each other in talking about space. In Ch. 3‘Spatial dialogue between partners with mismatched abilities’ (23–39), Michael F. Schober shows that interlocutors’ individual spatial abilities can affect spatial descriptions in dialogues.

Constanze Vorwerg, in Ch 4 ‘Consistency in successive spatial utterances’ (40–55), looks at speakers’ descriptions of various scenes and proposes that speakers tend to use similar strategies such as consistent reference frame, lexical items, and syntactic constructions. In Ch. 5 ‘An interactionally situated analysis of what prompts shift in the motion verbs come and go in a map task’ (56–69), Anna Filipi and Roger Wales use  conversation analysis to investigate map descriptions of pairs of adults and pairs of children, focusing on the verbs come and go. The results indicate that most speakers use the verb go, even though this use shifts their perspectives.

Luc Steels and Martin Loetzsch, in Ch. 6 ‘Perspective alignment in spatial language’ (70–88), provide results from a series of experiments with paired robots in order to investigate perspective-taking in spatial language. They show that robots, too, need to learn each other’s perspective to establish successful communication. In Ch. 7 ‘Formulating spatial descriptions across various dialogue contexts’ (89–103), Laura A. Carlson and Patrick L. Hill show that speakers construct spatial relations with a preference for a reference object in a salient relation. In Ch. 8 ‘Identifying objects in English and German: A contrastive linguistic analysis of spatial reference’ (104–18), Thora Tenbrink examines how English and German speakers differ in their written spatial descriptions from a web-based study. In Ch. 9 ‘Explanations in gesture, diagram, and word’ (119–31), Barbara Tversky, Julie Heiser, Paul Lee, and Marie-Paule Daniel present work on interlocutors’ gestural, verbal, and diagrammatic descriptions of navigation and instructions to assemble objects in the stimuli.

Timo Sowa and Ipke Wachsmuth, in Ch. 10 ‘A computational model for the representation and processing of shape in coverbal iconic gestures’ (132–46), provide a formal representation that takes speech and gesture into account in object-shape descriptions. In Ch. 11 ‘Knowledge representation for generating locating gestures in route directions’ (147–65), Kristina Striegnitz, Paul Tepper, Andrew Lovett, and Justine Cassell investigate how an embodied conversational agent on a computer can generate human-like gestures when giving directions. In Ch. 12 ‘Grounding information in route explanation dialogues’ (166–76), Philippe Muller and Laurent Prévot analyze feedback strategies of French speakers giving route descriptions on the phone. Finally, in Ch. 13 ‘Telling Roland where to go: HRI dialogues on route navigation’ (177–90), Shi Hui and Thora Tenbrink address potential problems in human-robotic wheelchair dialogues during route instructions.